For marketers, social media is a vast laboratory in which buyers offer detailed feedback about products, features, service delivery, and general sentiment about brand and company. However, for better or worse, on social media this feedback loop plays out in public. If buyers, prospects, and observers have positive sentiment, those views become part of a shared public record that supports the brand and is available for anyone to see. On the other hand, negative views can quickly go viral and cause damage.
In the digital world, characterized by high transparency and the rapid spread of information, brands must pay special attention to disparities between their brand promise and consumers’ experience. A study by management consulting company, Bain, calls this disparity the “delivery gap.”
Closing the gap. Minimizing the gap is especially challenging to marketers because the customer’s experience involves a broad spectrum of corporate activities, many of which lie outside marketing. Everything from product design through sales, support, and post-sales service contribute to the consumer experience. In other words, a full range of corporate operations ultimately shapes buyer experiences and perceptions.
Nonetheless, marketing can play a special role in serving as an advocate for both company and customer. Especially online, brand advocacy is crucially important for creating a relationship between consumer and company. Research by Weber Shandwick, called the European Advocacy Study, concluded, “brand advocacy is five times more effective than advertising in prompting purchase.”
Marketing has a pivotal role to play in establishing productive relationships with buyers, in both consumer-
oriented and business-to-business companies. Marketers can take four steps to fulfill this role and help close the gap between brand promise and customer perception:
- Listen to the customer. Marketers can engage and interact with customers online in forums, on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and wherever customers congregate. It sounds trite and cliché, but joining the conversation is the first step to developing an engaged relationship with customers.
- Amplify the customer’s voice. After listening and understanding to matters of importance to customers, marketers can bring the customer perspective back into the company. Doing so enables marketing to support the company’s efforts to create better products and focus more precisely on points important to customers. Do not underestimate the power of accurate information in improving the company’s overall ability to deliver products and services that delight and thrill customers.
- Empower customer relationships. Customers understand that no brand or company can create perfection all the time. It is human nature to overlook some faults when we like a person or brand, especially if we feel they want to do the right thing. Therefore, marketers should communicate openly, honestly, and authentically with customers to cultivate a positive relationship. Doing so gives the customer insight into constraints facing the brand, setting the ground to ease tension through dialog should the customer ever become unhappy.
- Choose to be an advocate. A true advocate provides tremendous benefit to both company and customer, by putting a human face on interactions and communication in both directions. The real power of online, digital marketing lies in the ability of skilled advocates to bridge the gap between company and customer.
Culled from Zdnet.