Having the best products and services isn’t enough to sustain success as a small business. You need people to buy those products and services repeatedly. To make that happen, you need to foster strong relationships with your customers.
When you take the time to get to know your customers, provide them with what they need, and keep growing the relationships, they’re more likely to advocate for your brand and keep coming back to your business.
Strengthen your customer relationships with the help of these tips.
Understand Who Your Customers Are
You can’t form a genuine relationship with someone you don’t know. So, take the time to understand who your customers are, what they want and need, and how to best give these things to them.
Start by rounding up all sources of customer data. For example, if you’ve hosted various business events, hopefully, you’ve been collecting data about the people who attend through registration forms, in-person conversations, and their posts on social media with event-related hashtags.
Event attendees can also give valuable feedback about your events and what you’re doing and offering them. You can use this data to adjust your approaches to events, products, customer service, and content to better serve customers.
Other places to find information about your customers that will help you strengthen your relationships with them are:
-
Focus groups;
-
Website analytics;
-
Social listening tools;
-
Social media analytics;
-
Customer feedback surveys;
-
Your ideal customer profiles;
-
Data analysis tools on your email marketing platform.
Keep in mind that getting to know your customers is an ongoing project. Their needs and wants are ever-evolving, and you’ll need to keep up to stay relevant with them and keep the relationship progressing.
As you collect customer data on various channels, make sure you’re filtering it into a system that will keep it organized and accessible.
Create a Single View of the Customer
It’ll be hard to do anything with the customer data you collect if it’s housed in different places. The chances of you missing important information that could drive your customer relationships forward are high.
A central database where all customer data is managed and stored is beneficial in this regard. It acts as a “single source of truth,” also known as a “single view of the customer.”
A single view of the customer plays a huge role in building strong relationships because you can quickly find the information that helps anticipate customer needs and create personalized experiences.
Which platform you choose to create your single view of the customer on depends on:
-
Your budget;
-
Your and/or your team’s abilities;
-
How much customer data you have and want to collect;
-
What unique features you need to properly analyze, organize, and manage data.
Keep the above at the forefront of your mind when researching different platforms and making your final decision.
Create Great Content Across All Marketing Channels
One thing your customers will interact with a lot is your content. If you pour effort and resources into crafting high-quality content consistently, you open up lots of opportunities for people to get to know you, your brand, and your business offerings.
The first step is understanding what kind of content your customers need to continue moving through the buyer’s journey.
Learn what your customers are doing in the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buyer’s journey. After that, pair each stage with content types and topics that speak to the needs of your customers in each stage.
Once you know what kind of content to craft to generate engagement and prompt sales, you can move on to creating it. Set a content creation schedule where you choose a couple of days out of the week to create and edit content.
Consider using a platform that helps you edit your content for different platforms, that way you don’t have to create different versions manually. Look into AI-powered content creation tools that will generate topic ideas, headlines, and even full posts for you. Also, look for a tool that you can schedule content to go out automatically.
Creating great content across all of your marketing channels is much more manageable when you have a real system and tools for creating and publishing content seamlessly.
Gather and Implement Customer Feedback
You can build trust and stronger relationships with your customers when you show them how eager you are to hear their feelings about your business. They’re more likely to feel valued and appreciated, increasing the chances of them continuing their relationship with you.
Their feedback on their experience is invaluable. They’ll tell you what they love about your business. More importantly, they’ll tell you what they don’t like and how to improve it.
Analyze your customer feedback loop. How are you currently gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback? If you don’t have anything in place, that’s where you need to start.
Establish a channel for gathering customer feedback, like customer satisfaction surveys through email or the submit a review page feature on your website. Like your customer data, filter feedback into a central system so it’s easier to maintain and use.
Next, set a schedule for analyzing feedback. Whether you do so once a week or once a month, make sure you’re delving into customer feedback regularly.
Finally, prioritize feedback based on how quickly you can and how important it is to implement. From there, you can move down your list, implementing what you’ve learned from customers one by one.
Entrepreneurs who prioritize building strong relationships with their customers will enjoy brand loyalty, consistent sales, and long-term success.