When many people think about marketing, they immediately go to external channel selection and getting messages out large and bold for everyone to see.
This is great if you are wanting to just push your brand, but ensuring that people understand the value of your brand and develop a loyal following is a very different style (and channel of marketing). It’s also extremely crucial as loyalty will encourage repeat patronage and ongoing relationship with customers and we all know it’s cheaper to retain customers than find and develop relationships with new ones.
When developing loyalty, there is one crucial marketing tool that is highly under resourced and commonly forgotten by many businesses – staff.
On an ongoing basis, staff are the ones who generally deal with customers the most, whether over the phone, face to face or behind the computer screen responding to emails and social media messages. They have the ability to influence a customer’s decision to end or maintain a relationship with a particular company, due to their own individual behaviour.
Making your employees your marketing champions
Engaged and supported employees are much more likely to have a positive reflection and attitude towards their work and their company. It’s this engaged and positive attitude that will help to build that customer relationship. If an employee isn’t engaged and supportive of the brand that they are working for (we all have bad days but we’ll look at this in terms of general behaviour), customers will feel this negativity and are less likely to feel a positive affiliation with that company based on this one negative interaction.
It’s also in the way that they are dealt with through a customer service relationship. Staff who are more intent on supporting the customer and doing a good job are more likely to gain repeat purchase and relationships – and the more engaged and inspired a staff member is the more likely they are to provide excellent customer service.
The difference between customer service and marketing champions
Customer service is the first part in developing staff as your marketing champion but much of this is only focussed for when people are “on the job”. It’s the opportunities to support and champion a brand outside of the work environment that really makes a marketing champion. Think about a marketing champion as someone who goes above and beyond their general tasks including:
- Referring customers to the business
- Following the business in social media environments
- Referring employees to the business
- Actively reviewing and providing feedback and ideas on how to improve and market the business
- Building and maintaining relationships with customers and suppliers
- Influence word of mouth marketing
Many businesses commonly forget about the power of using staff to help market their business and brand which is a large missed opportunity. With a lot of marketing activity you don’t have the ability to personally influence the way that someone feels about the message that they receive where people to people do. Using your staff as a marketing tool – training them to deliver the right messages, respond to customers the right way and also helping to drive sales and results will help to drive significant results for your business. The training component is crucial but so is communication and ensuring that your staff are regularly informed of activity that is happening within and outside of the business. This all helps to empower and engage staff, resulting in the positive customer experience and marketing champions. Allowing them to be a part of your brand strategy, and keeping them continually involved in it, will ensure ongoing customer relationships and positive marketing activity from within.
Your staff are under your control. You have the ability to influence them and train them to help you in the way that you need. People need to feel that they are trusted and empowered and once you achieve that, you have a very powerful marketing tool that you can easily manage and control every day – and get measurable results from.
Don’t forget about or disregard them – they can help you achieve what you want to achieve for yourself and your business. Treat them with respect and keep them empowered. Not only will it help you with your marketing but also your business growth.
Good Luck.
The Marketing Elf
© March 2018
The Marketing Elf 