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Effective consumer relations can make or break your business. If you’ve developed a strong connection with your customers, you can ensure you don’t lose out to your competitors. From building up strong relationships with them to constantly developing your marketing strategy, each step you take will help to develop your business growth. At the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub, we want you to get the best from your business and have strong connections with your customers. We’re here to listen to your problems and find the right funding support for your business needs.
Digital marketing
In a world dominated by technology, it’s important that you have an online presence. Without digital in the marketing of a business, you run the risk of missing out on a whole network of people that may interested in to your business. By marketing online you can help to develop effective customer relations by engaging with your customers on social media and creating conversations.
Digital marketing is the promotion of your business through electronic media, e.g. emails and social media. It’s especially important since the days of a buyer coming straight to you for information about your business are long gone. Sellers don’t have as much power as they used to. If a customer wants to know something, they’ll go online and find out what other people are saying about your product. They’re more likely to believe a review from someone outside of your business. So, using digital marketing can help you to weigh in and have your business’s voice heard.
We’ve mentioned using the Internet for digital marketing, but it also can include text messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, radio channels, etc. If you don’t use digital marketing, you could be missing out on various benefits. For example, the chance to acquire new customers, which need to be accessed online; and getting ahead of your competition – if your competitors have a strong online presence then you may be losing out on customers to them. Digital marketing is also one of the cheapest forms of marketing.
Sending an email is going to cost you a lot less that a print campaign would and the results can be tracked. You’ll be able to monitor what content your customers are engaging with, which can be beneficial in two main ways:
- If you know what subject lines work best to get your customers to open emails, you can utilise similar content in the future to increase engagement. If your customers are engaging more with your emails, you’ll be reaching a wider audience with your marketing.
- With emails, if you include a website link, you can find out who is clicking through. This link may be for one of your products, so you can track which products are gathering the most interest. Down the line this could be useful for product developing and creating something that has a large market.
Not sure where to get started with your digital marketing? Give us a call at the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub. It doesn’t cost you anything to have a quick chat with us and, from it, we’ll be able to direct you towards support for digital marketing, such as the Digital Project, which covers the cost of training sessions to get you prepared for taking your business online.
Brand management
Brand management is about controlling those perceptions to suit the needs of your business and creating effective consumer relations. Before you think about brand management, you need to able to define your brand. Some people see a brand as the name or logo of a business – this is true, but it’s also much more. A brand is the associations that people make with your business, product or service.
How you market your business will influence how your brand is viewed. For example, with social media you have the opportunity to engage with your customers and create a friendly, chatty persona. This is just one way to build up how your brand is perceived. How your product looks, the price and packaging will also impact how people view your product.
Branding is important as it can create trust and confidence with your customers, so get in touch with us at the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub and we’ll help you get your brand management in order. For example, if you could benefit from the support of a consultant, the Manufacturing Growth Programme can help to cover the cost.
Market Analysis
Market analysis is an important stage for any business and must be done before you start developing your product or service, especially if you want to have effective customer relations. Without it, you wouldn’t know whether there is an actual demand for your product or if it already exists. Plus, this analysis will help to determine where the marketing of a business needs to be aimed. Marketing is an ongoing process and will help you to stay ahead of your competitors and reach customers that are actually interested in what you offer.
You will need to research three main areas: your industry, customers and competition:
- Your industry - understanding the current state of your industry will help you to tailor your product to suit your customer’s needs.
- Your customers - it’s important that you understand if there’s a market out there for your product, otherwise you’ll struggle to make any sales. You can research through various techniques (talking directly to your customers, surveys, etc.)
- Your competition - be thorough and check what products already exists and know who your competition is. You don’t want to create a product that already exists and for it to be redundant, neither do you want to aim for a market that includes tough competition.
These details on market analysis are just beginning to scratch the surface. If you’re interested in finding a new route to market, or just want to get ahead of your competition, this is definitely a must. For more information, give the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub a call and we’ll be happy to keep you on the right track.
Client relationship management
Client relationship management, also known as customer relationship management (CRM), is about keeping track of your business’s interaction with customers. By analysing your customers’ behaviour, you’ll be able improve retention and increase your amount of customers. CRM usually refers to a CRM system – a tool to help you with sales management, customer data, workflow processes and much more.
With effective CRM, some of the benefits include:
- A better understanding of your customer’s – by keeping track of your customers behaviour, e.g. which emails do they open, you’ll be able to understand what they like and what content you should push to them to promote your products / services.
- Better communication for employees – storing your customer’s data and behavioural patterns on one secure CRM system will mean that it’s easier for employees who have the right clearance to access the data, and see customer expectations.
- Improvement of your customer service – if a customer got in touch, with a CRM system, you’d be able to access all of that customer’s activity, e.g. past purchases, preferences, and much more.
- Discovering new insights from business data – by having all this data and information on your customer’s behaviour, you might be able to spot trends that could benefit your business. For example, you might find that if people buy product A, they also tend to go for product B. Therefore, in the future, you could promote product B to those customers that have bought product A, but not made the second purchase yet.
For further support on how to set up CRM and find a system that works for you, give us a call at the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub. We can check your eligibility for funding and ensure you get the most relevant support. For example, you might not be aware that there is lots of skills funding available, such as Skills Support for the Workforce. This covers the entire cost of your chosen course, so you’ll be able to send your employee on customer relationship management courses.
Key account management
To develop effective customer relations, you should give some time to key account management. Key account management (KAM) is surprisingly a tricky thing to pin down and many businesses define it differently. But, in theory its main purpose is to build up long lasting relationships with your customers. It’s not just about making lots of big sales, it’s about handling consumers who play a big role in your business.
Not every account, or customer that you sell to, is a key account. Those that are will have a big impact on your business and will have a trusting relationship with your business. It’s important because the power is no longer in the seller’s hands, especially because of the internet. If a buyer doesn’t like what you’re offering (e.g. they don’t agree with your prices), they can easily search and find a new supplier. So, building up relationships and putting in extra effort can really go a long way to creating customer loyalty.
If the thought of this is making your head spin, get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub. We’re here to listen to any issues that you’re having with your business and make sure you get the answers that you need by directing you to funding support. If you need expert advice, the Manufacturing Growth Programme will benefit you, as it is a grant to cover 35% of the cost of consultants.
Creating customer value
Customer value is understanding which part of your product or service prevents your consumers from going to your competition instead. Creating growth in your business depends on a range of factors, including customer value. What that value actually means will depend on who you ask. To some people, value means price (e.g. the customer looks for value for money when buying), or it could be the benefit of your product (is the product actually fixing a problem? What does your customer get from it?).
To get results from creating customer value, you first need to analyse what it is your customers see as that value. If your product is quite expensive, you might want to promote the value as high quality and having a wide range of benefits. Understand what drives your customers: use questionnaires, check your personal data on them, and speak to them face-to-face. This can be useful for marketing and how you promote your product.
A few examples of creating customer value include:
- Change your prices so that your customers believe they’re getting more than they paid for.
- Reducing the price, or keeping the same price whilst adding something more to your product, e.g. an expansion on your product, or a new service.
- Making it convenient for the customer to access your product, e.g. taking your business online, so that customers that can’t easily reach your business have an alternative route to your products.
This is just the beginning of how you can create customer value. What you choose will depend on what your customers view as value. Some people may find the customer service of your business the biggest value of your product. If so, simple tasks such as smiling at your customer and being attentive will make them feel valued.
If you’re based in the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding area, get in touch with the Growth Hub. We’ll be able to introduce you to the right funding schemes that can support you with developing effective customer relations.
Presenting / Pitching
By presenting clearly and effectively, you’ll be able to get your message or opinion across and possibly persuade people to support your business, so it’s definitely worth brushing up on your presentation skills.
An effective presentation usually happen when:
- You’ve fully prepared. Whatever your subject, make sure you do all the necessary research or have collected any figures that could support your statements. Don’t just wing it.
- You stay on topic and focused. If you’re nervous, there is probably a temptation to go off on a tangent or ramble. But, doing this would make you lose the attention of your audience and they may even forget what the whole purpose of your presentation was.
- You’re passionate about what you’re discussing. Your audience will feel more engaged if you’re enthusiastic and confident about your subject.
If you’re confident at presenting and just want to improve your abilities further, or you are a nervous presenter, get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub. However you feel about presentations, we’re happy to help.
Strategic Marketing
Strategic marketing is about developing effective consumer relations by marketing through channels that are best suited to your customers. Having a strategy can help you to identify customer needs, leading to an increase of sales. When writing a strategic marketing plan, you should include what type of marketing (e.g. email, advertisements, newsletters) you plan to use and how. Don’t forget to consider your budget as well when deciding how you’ll market. You don’t want to invest lots of money in a newspaper campaign, only to realise that you don’t have enough funds for it or your target audience doesn’t actually use this source.
You may need to get innovative to better dominate the market. For example, social media has become a popular marketing tool for businesses, so there’s a lot of competition on that channel. You need to make sure your business stands out from the crowd and your voice isn’t lost amongst your competition.
Your strategy will need to start with a market analysis (head further up in this article for more info on this), because there’s no point targeting one market (e.g. online) if it’s not relevant for your specific customers. By doing the research, you’ll know how to target your marketing to produce the most sales and get ahead of your competition.
For guidance on marketing research and more strategy details, get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub. We can point you towards relevant funding support, such as the Manufacturing Growth Programme, which is a grant that will cover 35% of the cost of a consultant.
Pricing
It’s important to get the prices right for your products / services. You don’t want to overcharge and be overlooked by customers. But, equally, you don’t want to lower the cost too much and not end up making any profits. Or, your customers may think your product or service is inferior to that of the competition if your pricing is too low. Many businesses fail because their service or product pricing was incorrect, so you want to get this right.
You should ask yourself: what can you include in the costing, will you make a profit, what are your competitors charging, can you compete with them, what price are your customers prepared to pay and where are you positioning yourself in the market place. When pricing your product, think about ensuring your costs are covered (e.g. materials or products, staff, overhead costs).
How much your customers currently pay can be used as a benchmark for you to work to. You might be tempted to copy this price, or lower it to stand out, but make sure you know it covers all of your costs first. You don’t want to find you can’t even afford to produce your product/service as you’ve undercharged too dramatically. People don’t want to think they’ve been "ripped off", but if you charge higher and are able to produce something of high quality, they’ll likely be more forgiving then if you charge under and produce something of poor quality.
If you’re unsure about pricing your products then give the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub a call. We can put you in touch with the right people for eligible funding.
Marketing Communications
Like the title suggests, marketing communications, is all the messages and media you use to communicate with the market, such as advertising, branding, packaging, social media, PR etc., everything that you’ve used to connect and create effective consumer relations. You will need to keep track of these communications to help improve your customer preferences and to shorten the sales cycle.
Communication tools help to develop your relationships with your customer. For example, your social media engagement creates a voice for your brand and allows you to speak directly with your customers. All of this is with the intention of getting into your consumer’s mind and pushing your competition out of sight.
When planning your marketing communications, you’ll want to think:
- Cost – can you actually afford to run a campaign? Is it worth investing your money into your marketing strategy?
- Impact – will you be reaching a large number of people and have a clear message?
- Credible – are you creating a campaign on a route to market that will be viewed as legitimate?
- Control – can your target a particular audience?
Building a strong relationship with your customers can increase sales, and you might want to achieve this through marketing communications. If you think your business could benefit from this then get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub and we’ll ensure you get the support that you need.
New Customer Acquisition
You might often hear that it’s easier to sell to current customers, rather than find new ones. But, at some point in your business, you will need to acquire some new customers. New customers means more cash and by diversifying your market, you’ll have control of a bigger market share. Figuring out how to do this can be difficult, and you’ll need to develop a solid customer acquisition strategy – winging it won’t cut it. Although you should look at what your competitors do (e.g. what channels do they use?), what works for them won’t necessarily work for you.
What you choose to do to find these new customers will mostly depend on what your business is and who your customers are. You’ve got a lot of options out there for customer acquisition. You can work on improving your search engine optimisation (SEO), which is about improving where you rank on google search engines. If you have a higher rank on Google, e.g. appear on the first page, more people are likely to find your business page. A lot of your efforts will be trial and error and figuring out which channel is best suited to your business.
Some tactics include:
- Approaching your contacts that aren’t engaging – if you have customers that aren’t opening your emails and interacting with your content, then they’re likely not buying your product. You need to try to increase their engagement and make those existing contacts active customers.
- Extending on existing products – find new customers by building upon a current product that you have, which is already successful, but aim it at a new market. You may also find that your current loyal customers might buy into this new product as well.
- Create a website – we’ve mentioned a few times how an online presence can be used to attract customers, but this isn’t very useful if you don’t actually have a website. So, it might be time to create a website for your business. This way, customers that can’t easily access your store will be able to purchase your products.
These are just a few brief ideas to how you can start acquiring new customers. You have a lot more options, so give us a call at the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub if you'd like to be able to discuss what your next steps could be for your business.
Conclusion
Building up effective consumer relations is key to business success. Everything from pricing and marketing will affect how your customers interact with your business. If you need help to develop the connection between your business and consumers, get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub. We’re a free service that can offer advice to guide you in the right direction for consultancy support and funding.
If your interested in finding our more then you can get in touch at support@howsbusiness.org