Home Grown Marketing Strategies

Where does customer service fit into the grand scheme of things, when it comes to planning a good marketing strategy?  Mention marketing to anybody, and they start thinking about sales, offers and deals.  While, they too are important, having a good customer service relationship also plays a key role.

The customer you have is more valuable than the customer you want.  Once a company gets the business of a person, they often forget that the need to keep this person just as happy as the new guy.  In what ways are an existing customer more valuable than a new customer?

Establish Yourself as a Trusted Brand

They have bought from you before, they might buy from you again.  It is human nature to go with what we know, and what we trust.  Every day we buy the cereal we like the most, we go to the grocery store we went to as a kid, we buy a Wii for Christmas, because Nintendo were always our favorite.  While the initial sale is important, we also need to keep in mind that establishing yourself a trusted brand with any customer is worth even more.

Marketing the Conversations

If they are happy with their service, you get free word of mouth advertising.  What is word of mouth advertising? According to Wikipedia:

Word of mouth is a reference to the passing of information from person to person. Originally the term referred specifically to oral communication (literally words from the mouth), but now includes any type of human communication, such as face to face, telephone, email, and text messaging.

We trust the opinions of people we know the best.  No magazine advertisement or 30 second commercial spot can beat your Grandmother.  Actually, nobody should beat your Grandmother, because that wouldn’t be very nice. Winning over public opinion can be hard to achieve, but once it has been done – it will out perform any other form marketing out there.

Many of us have downtime around the holidays, so now is the best time to come up with new ways to market our online businesses or web sites.  Make sure while you do, you don’t leave out those customers or clients you have already won over.