In the past twenty years the process of reaching your customers and interacting with them has undergone a massive change, and it’s still changing. Before the digital revolution, connecting with potential customers was a hit-or-miss proposition. By sending advertising messages to crudely defined demographic groups, you’d either build up sales leads or hope that you reached your target audience and they would respond by walking through the door of your store.
Today it’s possible for any company, large or small, to form individual bonds with customers, and much more precisely deliver what each customer craves. This is the goal of big retailers like Amazon, but it can also be the goal of a trendy startup or a local mom-and-pop store.
Here are four recent innovations in marketing. How many can you leverage to stay ahead of the competition?
- Nike’s customer service Twitter account. We all know that Twitter is a powerful platform for sending out messages. But sportswear manufacturer Nike created a separate Twitter account—@NikeSupport—solely for customer support, which means fast-response customer interaction. The language used by the Nike customer support staff is casual and non-corporate.
Having a separate account for customer support helps Nike be accessible to its customers without burdening its own Twitter content on @Nike or @NikeStore with fast answers to specific questions about people’s orders or accounts.
- Whole Foods blog. The food retailer’s website features a wealth of information about a wide range of topics, from what it means to be vegan to making a better cheeseburger. By positioning itself as an educational resource, Whole Foods makes its lifestyle and products more inclusive. Proactive language (“I want to learn/do/both” as a search option in its navigation bar) makes you feel like you have an active role in the experience.
Does Whole Foods want you to buy from them? Of course they do! But they want you to trust them and look to them as an educational resource.
- Share a Coke. Is there any product closer to being a commodity than Coca-Cola? But the venerable soft drink maker sets its product apart by offering personalized Coke bottles. For $5 you can order a bottle of Coke with your name printed on the label. You can also choose from prefab custom labels, such as the names and numbers of NASCAR drivers. So if you crave drinking an ice-cold Coke from a bottle with your name on it, it can be in your refrigerator virtually overnight.
- Farmers Insurance Inner Circle. Is there any product or service more boring to consumers than insurance? Farmers Insurance has set out to change this perception with a super customer-friendly resource that provides visitors with a wide variety of educational articles about things like how to prevent identity theft, taking care of your car and your house, or what you need to know if you’re going through a divorce.
With this resource, Farmers Insurance establishes itself as an expert in a totally approachable way. And of course if you have questions, the chat feature is standing by to convert you from a visitor to a customer.
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