What Is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy is a plan of action designed to promote and sell a product or service. This strategy refers to a business's overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products or services.
A marketing strategy can be understood by the following:
- Value Proposition
- Key Brand Messaging
- Data on Target Customer Demographics
- High-Level Elements
If we need a complete strategy, we can also include the 4 Ps of marketing:
1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion
How to create an effective engagement marketing strategy:
For an engagement marketing strategy, we should always keep in mind the needs of our existing customers during their purchase journey. To achieve this, each business should follow these points:
Identification of crucial steps during the purchase journey of its target audience
Inclusion of a touchpoint to reach customers consistently
Provide helpful, personalised, and customised information for a positive customer experience
Customer Loyalty
6 Customer engagement strategies:
1. Know your customer journey:
To start developing a customer engagement strategy is mandatory to know your audience – your customers, their needs, demands, and expectations.
2. Customer loyalty programs (CLP):
A CLP is an excellent way to attract existing or new customers to buy from your business. At the same time, these programs build a trustworthy relationship between the company and its clients
3. Offer personalized service:
Personalization makes sense – customers want products or services that are tailored to them and their needs.
4. Implement a chatbot:
That's one of the more intelligent customer engagement strategies because chatbots will work based on what the user needs.
5. Use analytics:
Analytics helps the business identify its customers' needs, what they like and dislike, and of course, what their feedback is.
6. Use visual engagement tools:
Any tool that uses visual means to engage customers can help you create a more human experience.
The Six Components of Customer Engagement Strategy
1. Purpose
To devise an effective strategy, each business must first identify what it wants engaged customers to do for the company. Next, you need a purpose to give your strategic focus.
2. Engagement Opportunities
Four questions can understand this component:
What are the essential collaboration activities that support the engagement strategy?
What are the most crucial advocacy activities that support the engagement strategy?
How do you determine each activity's importance and priority?
Once identified, what resources do you have to support these activities?
3. Customer selection and enticement
Here comes the need to choose and separate each customer based on the business's needs. What are the opportunities that can help customers and pursuit the business's goals?
4. Measurement and impact on business metrics
To measure and impact business metrics, there is a need for a correlation between the measure of engagement by activity and its impact on the business.
5. Organisational alignment to customer direction
Although it is excellent if customers collaborate and advocate, engagement will be in the short-term if the organisation is not aligned around delivering improvements or outcomes from these activities.
6. Employee engagement
Whether intrinsic or extrinsic, Incentive programs may be effective and necessary in enhancing employee engagement in the customer service process.
Engage your customers strategically
A business's customer engagement strategy may have different levels of complexity at different stages. But must keep in mind that customer engagement will drive massive business value when a business pursues it in the long-term.
Sources:
Suthar, S. (2019). 8 Customer Engagement Strategies That Actually Work. [online] Acquire. Available at: https://acquire.io/blog/customer-engagement-strategies/
customerthink.com. (n.d.). The Six Components to Customer Engagement Strategy | CustomerThink. [online] Available at: https://customerthink.com/the-six-components-to-customer-engagement-strategy/
Brittany Hodak | Keynote Speaker. (2020). The 3 Important Qualities of Customer Service | Brittany Hodak. [online] Available at: https://brittanyhodak.com/the-3-important-qualities-of-customer-service/
Barone, A. (2021). Marketing Strategy. [online] Investopedia. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing-strategy.asp