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How to Increase Customer Loyalty through B2B Marketing

by Jennifer Beever

Customer ServiceMany B2B marketers get so caught up in new lead generation, their marketing and communications to existing customers can fall by the wayside. Now we have more tools to stay in front of our customers, keep them engaged and increase their loyalty.

Here are five ways to improve your marketing to your customers.

1. Remove any friction in your customer’s experience with your brand

Customer Touch Point MapThe first step in increasing customer loyalty is to make sure that there is no friction in the customer’s experience with your brand. There is a great and very easy exercise you can do to identify problem areas in the customer’s experience. It’s by mapping your customer touch points (read my previous post about this, Improve Service with a Customer Touch Point Map). Remember, these are not just marketing touch points – it’s anywhere in the customer experience that you touch your customer. Today your customer touch point map should include any social media platforms that you use. Friction can arise from not responding to customers in a timely manner on social media or having brand inconsistency from one platform to another.

2. Increase quality communications with your customers

People are inundated with messages, news and information. Identify a variety of ways to communicate with your customers and let them choose what works for them. Do they want to subscribe to your blog and receive email notifications when a new post is published? Do they prefer to listen to a podcast version of the blog while driving or working out at the gym? Do they spend a lot of time on Facebook and follow your content there? Do they want to subscribe to your eLetter?

3. Follow and engage with customers on social media

If your customers publish blog posts on their website and have branded company pages on social media platforms, by all means follow them and like and comment on their posts and updates. Following your customers on their Twitter and Pinterest does not require their permission. Others like LinkedIn and Facebook require that customers accept your invitation. It’s not unusual to find that in the closest of B2B customer relationships (ongoing accounting or customer service relationships are probably the most intimate), your employees have been invited and accepted personal connections with customers on sites like Facebook.

4. Add value for your customers by sharing informative content on social media

Content marketing helps attract new customers, but it can also be used to educate and engage existing customers. Great content marketing requires an intimate knowledge of your customers so that you can deliver what they need and deliver what they don’t even know they need! Content can include blog posts, videos, whitepapers, user guides, eBooks, slide decks, podcasts and more. Once you notice a piece content that is very popular on one medium, you can repurpose it to the other media to make it available in more formats.

5. Encourage customers to share your content and talk about your brand

You can’t tell customers to share your content and talk about your brand, and you can’t manipulate them or trick them into sharing. But you can set up the right sharing tools to make it easy for customers to share content when they feel they have gotten value or enjoyment from it. You can also provide places for customers to share with other customers, such as online discussions on LinkedIn or Facebook Groups, Twitter chats and more.

You’ve probably heard that it is many times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. So, don’t waste one of your businesses’s most valuable assets: your customers! Make sure you’re marketing to and adding value for your customers before it’s too late.

 

Do you need to improve your customer marketing? Contact New Incite today. We provide marketing plans and marketing execution to drive more brand recognition, customer loyalty, and revenue generation.

Photo on Flickr by striatic. Some Rights Reserved.

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