The best way to build your business online is to create customers that become advocates for your brand. When customers love your business, they will support it by talking about it and becoming engaged at your site and social media sites. This form of customer participation is the biggest contributor to gaining new customers. This is because getting recommendations from people who have experienced your products, services and customer experience management is exponentially more powerful than seeing an advertisement that you have paid for to recommend your products and services.
Online marketing and advertising of course is a necessary project to attract new customers and keep existing customers excited about your business offerings. But the online environment requires much more than that if you want to fully compete with your closest competition. It requires engaging with customers, creating relationships with them beyond the simple transaction and sales process. Sharing the personalities behind the business, and inside information about your company that give customers the feeling like they are part of the office culture will give you more success than throwing an ad out and hoping your customers will click on it.
Constant evaluation of interest is another activity to pursue in order to build your business using customer participation. When you are able to keep customer’s interest in your company, they will be more excited to stay engaged with your online presence. An important point to evaluate is who are your most productive customers? They say 20% of your customer base provides 80% of profits. Aim your site on the 20% and appeal to them first, then work on attracting more participation with less active customers. You can do this by actively acknowledging them on social media sites. An example of this would be to use the hashtag on Twitter followed by their name and thanking them for their business. When you implement that into a customer appreciation program, your customers will feel more valued, and will also be more apt to talk about your business to their friends and associates.
Cultivate your customers by using your website and social media sites and they will help you build your business by responding with recommendations and engagement that will add weight to your online social proof. Happy and talkative customers are worth their weight in gold, for your business reputation, as an aid to gaining new customers, and boosting you in the search engines due to their activity at your website and social media sites.
