5 Ways To Involve Customers In Your Marketing Strategy

Customers can be a very effective means of generating leads, increasing your customer base and pushing your overall marketing strategy forward.

Every business understands the importance of customers in the context of making sales, however, many forget just how key customers can be to exponential growth in the context of marketing.

Let's go through 5 of the ways customers can be used in your marketing strategy:

1. Referrals

This one is the simplest and should never really be overlooked. It takes minimum effort and doesn't cost a penny extra in marketing costs.

Referral- based marketing relies on your existing customer base to bring in your next batch, there's no great science to it. This can be done by capitalising on great customer service and a great customer experience having being delivered or incentivising the activity with future discounts and/or gifts. Let's take a closer look at the methods that can be employed here:

Gifts (Incentive):

Offering existing customers gifts such as vouchers or low-value products for a referral can be a simple method of gaining more sales through your existing customer base, and saving money on customer acquisition.

You can choose between offering these gifts based on a number of referrals regardless of outcomes, or only when a referral becomes a sale.

Discounts (Incentive):

Another method is to offer existing customers a discount on their future purchases based on referrals.

This can be especially effective if they are likely to need your services again or if your product fits a subscription model, in which getting a reduction is a clear benefit to see.

The added benefit of this method is it can act as an incentive for existing customers to be repeat customers and improve your customer retention.

Capitalising on a Great Customer Experience:

This method costs you nothing but requires that your services and products really delight your customer base. Once a sale is made and while, in theory, customers are at the happiest, you can simply ask if they've enjoyed their experience and if they would be willing to refer a relevant friend who could need the same.

Of course, you'd also reassure them that this would not be spam and you could go the extra mile by offering to CC them in the email or send them a copy of what you'll be sending out.

2. Reward Schemes

Reward schemes are for more than supermarket sales prediction tools. Any business can make use of one in order to increase customer retention. Offering rewards in the form of points or discounts based on customer actions can be a great way to push a sale forward or help skew a customer your way in their decision process.

If you're the only company in your industry offering one it could serve as a competitive advantage.

3. Social Media

Social Media is vast and is likely to affect many different areas of your business from customer service to lead sourcing.

In the context of your marketing strategy, you can make use of social media to interact with your customers. Asking questions, responding to their comments and where appropriate interacting with their content can all be tactics.

Customers value real-world relationships from brands and social media is a real way of building that relationship in order to connect with your customers in a meaningful way.

This has obvious benefits for customer retention, experience and word of mouth promotion.

4. Testimonials

People like to see proof of performance before spending their hard earned cash. They'll often search review websites and youtube videos to see what previous customers have to say about their experience, especially if you're a small business or startup that they are not likely to have heard of.

This method should be employed by businesses of all sizes but should be a focus of every startup when beginning your commercial activities, especially in the case of customers that are extremely happy with the service (of course much effort needs to be placed on ensuring they have a great experience).

Once you've collected a few of these, you can begin sharing them on your site, on your socials and on any printed marketing collateral you create.

The larger the persona or fame of the customer providing the testimonial, the better, as the testimonial is given more weight and authority. For this reason, you can give larger past or current customers an incentive to provide a testimonial.

5. Case Studies

Case studies aren't just for the non-profit sector, they are a great way of demonstrating expertise in a similar way to a testimonial.

This can be done with video interviews that you carry out, or if this would be difficult, the customer can be asked to record themselves. Of course, a higher quality recording done by you will play better and be preferred.

The end goal of this is to showcase how your product or service has helped them achieve their desired results.

You can create a report or longer video from combining these and this can be used for lead generation in your marketing strategy.

Remember customers are more than a source of income, they are a vital part of the internal workings of your business and can serve as a very effective tool in your marketing strategy.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!