I remember waking up at the beginning of lockdown and thinking marketing as I knew it had stopped. How could I advise clients to market, to sell, to chase enquiries, to convert business when no one had a clue what was going to happen. I knew one thing was an absolute must … hanging onto existing customers would become WAY more important than trying to find new.
So, what did I do?
I used the time to work on our customer journey. To walk in our clients’ shoes, to fill the gaps and spot the opportunities that would strengthen retention and highlight areas we needed to improve on. You can work on where to start with this by reading How to map your customer journey to spot the gaps and find immediate opportunities.
With my clients we did something similar but turned the dial up.
Working with their teams, we picked up the phones and got to work with one main focus. To retain customers.
The clients who did this did not lose one customer during lockdown. In fact, they gained more. From the problems we found out from existing customers, we turned into posts, blogs, web pages, pod casts, social media community groups and Ask the Expert sessions. All could be done in Lockdown without the big sales push. It attracted the right kind of customers to these businesses as they saw content based on helping people with similar problems.
We asked the questions.
Customers answered.
We turned this into content for more business.
You can start this today. Knowing the problems of your existing customers gives you more power to attract new ones AND (double bonus) you can iron out any problems before they come in.
What Next
Now it’s your turn. Take time out of your diary and put together a plan to reengage with every customer (use steps similar to the above). Record, review and refine your processes, your Customer Experience and best of all your marketing. This will save you time and money on marketing forever as you know exactly what your customers want AND you know what similar customers want too.
If you have an accountant, they should be your first stop for business advice. If you don’t have an accountant or they can’t help, BuBul has a wide range of experts available. For more advice contact our expert* Nigel on LinkedIn.
*We’ve picked experts we know and trust who are good at what they do. All of them will give you at least an extra 30 minutes free advice if you contact them and would then charge their normal prices. They don’t pay to be on BuBul and don’t give us any money from anything they earn as an expert.