In our business, we get called lots of names: custom publishers, social media specialists, SEO gurus, email marketers, magazine designers, and maybe a few more that probably shouldn’t be published here.
And depending on who you ask and what we’ve done for them, you’ll probably get a different perspective on what we do.
But none of the labels listed above fully describe what it means to create custom media. And how could they? We are talking about custom after all.
So I propose a new label that describes what we do in its simplest and purest form:
(Drum roll, please)
Customer engagement.
We help our clients maximize customer engagement, which enhances the value of their customer relationships. I believe in this label, or definition, so much so that this is how I typically introduce our company.
That said, what exactly does “customer engagement” mean?
First, let me be clear, customer, in this sense, means audience. It does not always refer to the traditional definition of customer. Your audience can be employees, association or non-profit members, students or alumni, distributors or retailers, residents of a municipality, guests, patients, and of course customers and prospective customers in the traditional sense.
The ‘customer’ in customer engagement truly refers to anyone you are communicating with in order to influence thinking or drive behavior. Sometimes my three children are even my customers and engagement is persuading them to clean their rooms.
As I break-down customer engagement, I start by thinking about my personal relationships with friends and family. In other words, who am I closest with and who are just acquaintances? It would take some time but I could likely order them from closest, those with the highest value in my life, to the acquaintances, those with the lowest or no actual value in my life.
Here’s a specific example that almost everyone can relate to. When I met my fiancé she was an acquaintance, a woman that I knew through a friend. I knew though the day I met her that I was attracted to her and that I wanted to get to know her better. Over the course of 18 months, I invested time and energy, sent “direct mail” in the form of a few greeting cards and flowers (and text messages), and I entertained her over dinners and eventually a weekend away. In those 18 months our relationship went from acquaintance all the way to engaged, literally, and next year we will be married. I added value to our relationship in every possible way.
My point is that marketers need to understand the metrics that define customer engagement, similarly to the metrics that define the value of a personal relationship. Once you grasp this concept, you can begin to actually score, or place a defined value on, how engaged customers are today, and what the value of maximum engagement actually is.
Then it becomes easy to determine what specific investments will need to be made to move them from an acquaintance to a customer that wants to spend the rest of their life with you.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Increase Customer Engagement by Leveraging Secret Tricks used in Addictive Computer Games (customerthink.com)
- How to Build Your Customer Engagement Online (socialmediatoday.com)
If you liked this, try:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
So you’re like a marriage counselor between customers and companies?
Polygamists aside, how can you scale having such an intimate relationship with more than one person at a time? How is it possible to put that much effort into each one on one relationship? I agree with your assessment, but wonder how much of it is purely idealism.
Interesting comments, thank you B.K. and Tom. We are definitely not marriage counselors. I say that because based on my own experience, if the customer relationship or ‘marriage’ is at a point that requires counseling, I would usually recommend good old fashioned personal service and face-time (a date) rather than any kind of strategic communications.
And yes, I would agree, comparing strategic account growth to an actual intimate relationship or a marriage proposal is a stretch, especially when you’re talking about thousands or possibly millions of customers. However, those thousands of accounts still consist of actual individuals, or people with professional needs and wants. Of course it is unrealistic to think that we can develop deep relationships (feels like a Match.com ad) comparable to marriage with 100% of our customer base, nor would we typically want to. But, there are always customers with untapped value and those are the customers our clients are typically working to engage.
This means something different for each and every client as it relates to actual results, but it always equates back to financial performance. For some increased engagement results in lengthened customer retention, for others up-selling, and yet for other cross-selling. In the casualty insurance industry, increasing the lifespan of 20% of customers by just three months, can equate to billions in increased earnings. An auto manufacturer up-selling 5% of their owners from cars to trucks also means billions in increased earnings. And in some cases, winning just one or two new accounts can mean billions in increased earnings. Strategic customer engagement is not the right approach for every marketer of every product or service, like marriage is not right for every man or woman, however for many, it can mean millions and sometimes billions in increased customer value.