Engage with your customers before someone else does!

A recently unveiled study by research consultancy Hall and Partners suggests that up to two-thirds of an organisation’s profits may rely on effective customer engagement.

Since the start of the current economic downturn, it’s never been more important for companies to communicate with its target audience. More power is in the hands of the customer and engagement has never been more difficult, more complex or more fragmented. What do we mean by engagement?

According to the Advertising Research Foundation in 2008, engagement is ‘Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context’. In other words, customer engagement encompasses awareness, interest, and desire to purchase, customer retention, and brand loyalty. How can customer engagement be achieved and maintained?

Terry Smith, Senior Lecturer in Marketing,  Programme Leader for MSc Management courses at  Warrington School of Management, and author of Marketing Communications: A Brand Narrative Approach gives us some insights into how successful companies can sustain brand attachment through effective marketing communications by promoting intangible values.

Know Your Customer: Customer insight comes from findings, observation, analysis of sales figures, experience, and other internal and external information which help you to serve those customers better. As a result of research, Pampers unblocked sales inertia in Germany by changing to a more acceptable eco-friendly bio-degradable formulation of its product. Their ‘dry layers’ innovation came as a response to the customer need for better sleep than merely water capture.

Help Build a Brand Story Together: When consumers add their own experiences, associations, symbols and images to the brand, they ‘co-create’ meaning. It is fair to say that until this co-creation has happened that consumers are not truly engaged with the brand. Organisations like Unilever have helped co-create the Dove brand narrative or story by ‘widening the definition of beauty’. When company and customer are locked together in the creation of the brand’s story, this is a powerful way to maintain engagement.

Understand the New ‘Terms of Engagement’: Social Media is the all-pervasive route to connecting with your customers through communications. Following some simple rules of thumb will help you build valuable relationships, increase brand loyalty and encourage customer advocacy:

• What is the personality of your brand or organisation? What does your brand mean to your customers? What voice could it have?
• Listen to online conversations and learn about what they think of you. Monitor customer attitudes and perceptions. Search engine analytics like Spiral16, Google Blog Search and Analytic.ly can be an effective way to ‘listen in’.
• Follow the alert systems on these tools to optimise the opportunities to engage online.
• Where are your customers interacting online? Are positive engagement or negative impressions present on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or blogs?
•  Become part of the online community and its conversation. Monitor the responses and feedback to give insight and possible action.
• Recognise the ‘opinion leaders’ in these networks. Who are the most influential and can affect the purchase behaviour of others?

Ensure all communications and all company communicators speak with ‘one voice’: Integrating all messages across all media is critically important. This will avoid confusion of message, reinforce brand image and offer a more coherent identity to both customers and staff. Make sure all staff are fully briefed and ‘on the same page’ in order to project confidence and consistency.

Have a customer engagement plan:

The process of product purchase tends to be a cycle of activities: brand awareness, consideration, inquiry, purchase, and retention stages. Sashi (2012) promotes the idea of a ‘virtuous circle’ which comprises: connection, interaction, satisfaction, retention, commitment, advocacy, and engagement.

This brings us back to the most important question: how are you going to achieve and maintain engagement with your customers? This is an important question because if you don’t, your competitors will!

Terry Smith is Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Programme Leader for MSc Management courses at Warrington School of Management, University of Chester, Warrington Campus, Crab Lane, Warrington.

 
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How can you be more communication savvy?

Andrea Harper

The success of any firm, large or small, is based on relationships and the key to any relationship is communication. Even organisational systems, processes and guidelines are ineffective without effective communication. However, numerous employee surveys highlight communication issues as top of the list when it comes to employee complaints writes Andrea Harper, Senior Lecturer in Business Management.

Research in this area also highlights the link between poor communication management and motivation, satisfaction, recognition and the bottom line – profit and success. Therefore, communication and how it is valued and managed can be viewed as an enabler or a disabler; it can be the means to both motivate and demotivate staff, to produce satisfied or dissatisfied staff.

 

The big question business owners and managers need to ask themselves, is: ‘Do we disable or enable our staff to help make our organisation successful?’

One of the main problems of communication in the workplace is that communication is all too often not managed. Organisational communication, in many firms, tends to be an unconscious concept – yet human resources, marketing, finance and operations are all managed consciously.

They are all important functions in an organisation and time, effort and resources are used to ensure they function effectively. The process of communication in the workplace, however, is often left to its own devises; communication just ‘happens’, it ‘doesn’t need to be managed’.

Therefore, in order to create a more successful business, communication in the workplace needs to be managed consciously. Communication needs to take its place in the hierarchy of organisational functions and processes; it should no longer be the Cinderella of organisational life. Therefore, it needs to be made a central part of organisational strategy and be viewed as pivotal in not only getting things done but getting things done successfully.

How can you be more communication savvy?

1. Recognition

Managers, not just top management, but all managers need to see communication for what it is – an enabler, it’s not just a tool to be wheeled out from time to time.

Communication as a concept/process should be embraced and needs to be recognised for its ability to unite a team by creating and maintaining openness; encouraging true involvement of  all       employees and facilitating cooperation.

Informed and motivated employees are ones who will take your organisation to a new level.

 

2. Conscious management of communication in the workplace

This should naturally follow on from managers’ recognition that communication or, more to the point, effective communication, is an enabler.

If its importance is recognised, managers will naturally start to manage the process consciously. Therefore, put it at the top of your agenda, build strong relationships and encourage your team to do likewise. Create more openness with your communications, e.g. think about the channels of communication you use, could you be more innovative in how you disseminate information?

 

Could you encourage two-way communication – not just to obtain feedback but to use your staff and their experience, knowledge and skills to get involved, to contribute more?

 

Employees need to believe that their contribution and ideas are welcome; they could make a difference. Managers should keep asking themselves have I shared ideas sufficiently? Have I included enough/the right people? Have I encouraged contributions? Who have I spoken to today? Did I persuade or did I tell? Has my communication been effective?

3. Lead from the front

When the management of communication starts to become effective, communication in the workplace starts to become effective. It breeds; it spreads. Openness and collaboration become the norm. Furthermore, if communication is valued and takes on a central role in manager’s lives, employees throughout the organisation will also start to embrace the centrality and importance of effective communication – helping to change attitudes.

 

 

4. Evaluate and learn

Review and evaluate are well-known manager mantras and many managers have the belief they are ‘good communicators’. The problem lies in the fact this belief isn’t necessarily held by their staff. What are staff saying about the organisation, about you, about the state of communication in your workplace? If you don’t know, find out. This is definitely good practice when an organisation has shifted to new thinking, new ways of doing things.

When all of these elements are pulled together, the organisation should start doing things differently. This will be demonstrated through employee motivation, satisfaction and organisational commitment. Stronger relationships with colleagues will ensue, employees will collaborate and cooperate more readily – they should feel more encouraged to challenge and get involved.

 

Andrea Harper is senior lecturer and Programme Leader in  Business Management at Warrington School of Management, University of Chester, Warrington (Padgate) Campus, WA2 0DB

You can find out more information about WSM by visiting our website. You can also follow us on Twitter 

 

Social Media: A key device in the business world

 

THE floatation of Twitter on the New York stock market and its pre-valuation at over $10bn indicates the high perceived value of social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others are now recognised as powerful devices of communication for businesses to reach their present and potential customer base.

Much of this is driven by the adoption of ‘smartphones’, now estimated in the UK at around 35 million users.  

 

Events such as the Rugby League World Cup have highlighted how this media can be used to keep ‘a buzz’ going and maintain an information stream. With ‘retweets’ going throughout the world this has also helped to raise the profile of Warrington.

However, most businesses have a long way to go in using social media to build their brand and communicate effectively. Marketing has moved on and some firms have been left behind.

A 30 minute drive from Warrington (traffic permitting) will take you into Merseyside, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and well into the heart of Cheshire. This gives the 8000 businesses in Warrington a potential regional customer base of several million people.

 

It’s no wonder that the excitement over Twitter is so high on the world financial markets. How else could you communicate with so many people?

How can Social Media help your business? Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader tells us how in our four-part guide.

 

 

Professor Lawrence Bellamy is Associate Dean at the Warrington School of Management, University of Chester Warrington (Padgate) Campus.

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@WSofManagement @ProfLawrenceB

 

Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Final Stage

Stage Five: Evaluation

Many smaller businesses are interested in directly aligning their social media strategy with their sales funnel. Some of the core measurement metrics to do this are:

	Facebook	YouTube	Twitter	LinkedIn
Retention Rate
Sales Volume per Customer
Revenue per Customer
Customer service Costs per Customer

The metrics you use should be directly linked to your social media objectives. If you want to clearly to see an ROI and monetised conversion rates associated with social media channels the best way to do this is by linking Google Analytics (free software)  to your website and setting up conversion goals. Further discussion on this topic needs a whole new article! However, you can visit http://www.google.co.uk/analytics  for more information. If you are considering going down this route make sure that every social media campaign is tagged by using Google Analytics’ ‘URL Builder’.

Summary

Hopefully, this article has given you a general overview of social media and how it can be utilised effectively to help generate leads, aid customer retention and build brand awareness. This article has only just scraped the surface of this topic – there are so many different aspects to social media and its uses that it is impossible to cover everything in a few pages. Sometimes, businesses rush into using social media channels because they are free and easy to set up – don’t fall into this trap because you can damage your reputation more by not understanding the characteristics of the medium being used. It is also a time-consuming marketing tool, so be sure it’s right for your business before rushing in.

 

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester) @WSofManagement.

Social Media: What is All the Fuss About? Stage 3 & 4

Stage Three: What are Your Social Media Objectives?

Once you have matched your customer persona/s to targeted social media platforms you need to be clear on your social media objectives, which should directly align with your core business objectives. Social media tends to achieve three marketing goals:

·         Lead generation

·         Customer retention

·         Brand awareness

You also need to consider the 3 Ms of: Management, Monitoring and Measurement. Generally, marketers dedicate an average of 1 hour a day to social media activities and according to research by EML Wildfire (May 2012), the following business benefits have been experienced from the on-going use of social media:

31%        Customer engagement

30%        Loyalty

25%        Traffic to website

21%        Sales turnover (due to active use of social media)

Stage Four: Plan Your Campaign

Once you have decided what channels to use and have clear objectives, it’s time to consider your overall strategy and tactics. Example strategies include:

·         Generate product awareness with solicitors who deal with ligation cases

·         Generate product awareness with new mums

·         Increase lead conversions from the company website

·         Develop and promote content to help facilitate a prospects’ decision-making process

·         Reduce customer service calls by dealing with enquires via social media channels

Ideas for tactics should be gained from: researching case studies, attending a course or employing a digital/ PR consultant to help you.  Four key questions to ask yourself at this stage are:

1.       Does the tactical idea deliver on the strategy?

2.       How likely is the customer persona likely to respond to this tactic, compared to others?

3.       Does my business have the resources to implement this tactic (in-house or outsourced)?

4.       What are the critical success factors and main barriers to achieving these?

Social Media: What is all the Fuss About? Final Stage

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).