Working as a marketing strategist for over 20 years has given me some valuable insight into the key ingredients of marketing success. Social media together with major technology changes has certainly broadened the scope and range of marketing strategies. However common sense tried and tested rules still apply. Here are my top 10 Must Dos.
Stakeholder engagement is also vital to word of mouth marketing and so is critical to ensuring that you are able to build recognition and protect the reputation of your brand to attract and retain customers. It can also be key to ensuring that your company is seen as a good employer that treats its staff as well as possible and is interested in providing the best working environment, whatever area of business or industry that you are in.
Online communities give brands an excellent forum for building strong and loyal relationships with their customers and other important stakeholders.In fact, they can be a sales and marketing dream, because if well executed, they enable the development of sustainable relationships that build brand loyalty and drives sales.There is no doubt that by creating a relevant and useful forum it opens up valuable two way communications with customers to enable “word of mouth” marketing that generates increased sales through repeat business and customer recommendation and referral
“If you don’t have good customer service, marketing is useless”
Purists may say that this is overstating the case, but increasingly the evidence is that the quality of a business’s customer service can make or break its marketing efforts.
In fact I would go so far as to say that customer service – “customer relations management” or “CRM” – has never been more important to successfully marketing a brand as it is right now.
To be successful in today’s climate brands need to take this on board and rehabilitate the way they’ve done marketing in the past.
Diana Chrouch of Chrouch Consulting has teamed up with the National Association of Women In Construction to create a marketing toolkit for women in the sector.