Investing to engage – How digital marketing enhances customer experience

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When most business owners think about digital marketing, they often think about how it serves the purpose of expanding the customer base. 

I empathise with this first thought but wanted to put pen to paper (well, fingers to keys) and push back against that way of thinking a little. 

You see, if we flip the script and see digital marketing as a tool primarily designed to enhance customer experience, I sincerely believe we will vastly improve the landscape for customers while encouraging growth as a byproduct. 

So, rather than seeing digital marketing as a means to the ends of growth, look at it as a means to the ends of customer experience where a positive byproduct is growth. 

Not convinced? Let’s look at some common digital marketing tools you can invest in today and how they can serve the purpose of enhancing customer experience. 

Facebook Ads

Nailing Facebook ads is probably the holy grail of customer-centric digital marketing. Perhaps that’s a bold statement but, let me lay out the case for you. 

Facebook ads, when fully utilising the Pixel, is a powerful toolkit for building a wide-reaching online presence. I’m sure you’re probably thinking that this doesn’t do wonders for customer experience because it’s essentially a means of stalking your customers across multiple devices. 

Could you bear with me on this?

If the intention of utilising FB ads and the Pixel is to get your products or services in front of your customers persistently then, well- we can’t be friends! If on the other hand, you use it with the explicit goal of enhancing customer experience, then the results will be incredible. 

So, how do we utilise FB ads and the Pixel to enhance customer experience? Well, it involves a great deal of social listening

Using ads and the Pixel to stalk your customers across platforms mercilessly is the equivalent to a marketer in a supermarket clinging to a customer and repeatedly bashing them in the face with the product they want to sell. Silly huh? 

If you get the social listening right, you’re likely to figure out what it is about you, your brand, your products/services that keeps customers coming back. You’re likely to tap into the culture behind your offer. Now take that and present it to your audience wherever they go. That’s exciting. 

Instead of having a nagging presence wherever you turn on the net, your customers now regularly encounter precisely what it is they love about your brand. 

It’s this subtle difference that presents us, business owners, with a compelling reason to invest in digital marketing as a means of improving customer experience. 

SEO 

SEO sometimes gets a bad rap. 

It can be perceived as a technique to cheat the algorithm and get your site in front of as many people as possible (without concern as to whether your site is relevant to those people). 

But, used as a tool to enhance customer experience, good SEO practices yield phenomenal results. 

Let me labour the point a little here: stop seeing SEO as a way of hitting the top spot for any given search term. 

Instead, learn your customer base. Then, make one assumption: your site offers the perfect solution to what your customers are searching for. It’s important to pause here for reflection. I’m not suggesting that you make that assumption as an unfounded one, not at all. Make that assumption on the basis that you’ve done your research and development well and have come up with the best possible solution to your customer’s problems. 

Ok, now SEO becomes a means of ensuring your customers find you. Not because you want more people to see your shiny website but because your site has the perfect solution to your customer’s search terms. 

Here are just two things professional SEO Agency can start doing for you now to enhance your customer’s experience: 

  • Blogging – You’re reading one now. Notice something – this post isn’t designed to tell you how excellent a particular product or service is (although, admittedly, I’m talking about services). This post is intended to provide you with useful pointers you can take action on to provide your customers with a better experience. That’s the power of a blog. Blogging offers your customers value without requiring anything from them. Gary Vaynerchuk calls it jab, jab, jab right hook
  • Link Building – This definitely gets bad press. I firmly believe that link building can be a great way to enhance customer experience. In fact, link building is a good thing. Again, it’s all about offering value. Focus on building highly valuable (for the customer, not you) links. Can you offer meaningful and valuable insight that can find it’s home on another site? If you can, and the content is genuinely about the, “give give give” philosophy, link building is for you. 

Social Content

I often find it amusing watching brands and companies thinking they can use social media to sell their stuff without understanding the platform. 

If all you intend to do with social media is advertising, you’ve misunderstood the power of social media. Vastly. 

If, on the other hand, you use social media for your brand like your customers use social media personally, then you’re on to a winner. Let’s unpack that idea a little. 

Why do people use social media? There’s a massive clue in the name. It’s social! 

Social media is a tool to enhance the connection between people. 

For the cynical, I agree it doesn’t always achieve this and that social media often functions ironically as a way of causing social disconnect (picture the teenager glued to their phone at the dinner table if you like).

Having said that, Social media is about enhancing connections between people. 

As a brand, set out to use social media in the same way. It’s not about selling; it’s about enhancing your connection with your customers. 

Ultimately, my intention in writing this article is to stir up a bit of excitement in business owners. I want to encourage you to see digital marketing in a different light. In fact (let’s be a bit radical) I want you to see digital marketing as your primary means of making your customer’s experience as good as it possibly can be.

Philip Piletic
Techloot
I have several years of experience in marketing and startups, and regularly contribute to a number of online platforms related to technology, marketing and small business. I closely follow how Big Data, Internet of Things, Cloud and other rising technologies grew to shape our everyday lives. Currently working as managing editor for a UK tech site.

1 COMMENT

  1. Great article! I enjoyed reading it. I am concerned with marketing in my job and I firmly believe that in order to be successful in terms of e-commerce, one should remember that customers should be viewed as our partners and not plain numbers. I work hard to have strong connection with my clients — as I think that only in such a way I can fully understand their needs. Besides, I use websites such as Datashop24, which help me in acquiring data of potential customers — when I send marketing e-mails I use databases from them to be sure that the data I got is proven and reliable. Customers need to feel important — that is in my opinion the key to successful marketing campaign.

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