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To be successful in business, it’s important to understand and meet or exceed your customers’ expectations. But what do marketers need to do to achieve this? Customer expectations are constantly evolving as technology advances and new trends emerge. As a marketer, you must keep up with these changes in customer expectations and adapt your campaigns accordingly to provide exceptional customer service. If you don’t, you may find yourself falling behind the competition and losing out on valuable business.
Having a solid understanding of customer expectations and the factors that influence customer experience will provide you with a market edge and increase customer loyalty.
It’s also important to understand why meeting customer expectations is important to increase customer loyalty . Read on!
Why Is Meeting And Exceeding Customer Expectations Important?
There are several reasons why marketers need to do their best to meet or exceed customer expectations. One of the most important reasons is that satisfied customers will be more open to paying a premium for your product or service, and even repeat business with you! If they feel like they can get what you’re offering somewhere else cheaper, you may find yourself losing them as a customer. Another reason for making customers happy and exceeding customer expectations is that it’s an effective way for marketers to demonstrate the brand’s commitment to quality and excellent service experience.
Components Of An Effective Marketing Strategy
A successful marketing strategy is one that incorporates a variety of tactics designed to achieve specific goals.
Following are the components of a marketing strategy:
- Branding
- Search engine optimization
- Lead generation
- Customer retention.
- Flexible Strategy
- Marketing Analysis
To understand how to improve your service quality and meet customer expectations, it is important to understand your shortcomings.
A business coach can also help you find a vetted marketer, or provide marketing insights themselves.
Why Do Marketers Fail to Meet Customer Expectations?
1. Customers are not always rational
Understandably, customers are not always reasonable. However, that does not make them wrong. Businesses should always remember to customize their products based on what the customer expects. It is important to be empathetic towards your customers and adapt your service quality accordingly.
While this may seem like common sense, many businesses simply do not do what customers expect them to do because they believe that even though they are doing something sub-par, they are still meeting customer expectations and fail to do market research.
2. Ineffective marketing campaigns
Consumers buy what they like. They do not care about your advertising or marketing strategies as much as you think they should. What marketers do and what customers respond to may be two different things; the business owner might think the strategy is perfect for his/her company, but rarely does it reflect well with customers’ expectations.
It is important for businesses to adapt to this factor and understand that just because someone agrees with their ideas does not mean that their customer base will agree with them. Customer feedback is important and so is customer satisfaction! Creating effective marketing campaigns is key to success!
3. Failure in defining customer expectation goals
Marketers are very good at developing strategies, but they are not always as successful in executing them. If a business cannot achieve its objectives, it is the marketer’s fault for failing to plan accordingly. When setting up a marketing campaign, one first needs to establish what he/she wants out of it before any progress can be made. Is the objective to increase sales? Or to get new customers?
4. Failure in building an online presence
Another big reason why marketers fail to meet customer expectations is a lack of online presence. More people are turning to the internet for all their shopping needs and marketing campaigns should be tailored accordingly. A company that does not have an online presence will find it extremely difficult to reach out to clients who prefer making purchases on the web.
With the emergence of social networking, having strong links with popular outlets such as Facebook or Twitter can help your cause significantly. This way you’ll be able to increase brand exposure and strengthen your market position.
5. Lack of follow-up measures
Yet another mistake commonly committed by marketers is failing to follow up with customers after they’ve made a purchase/registered on websites etc.
Once you feel that new leads have successfully converted, retaining them should be the next goal. But this aspect is often ignored by marketers leading them to lose leads. One should also consider generating leads from the purchases made by the customers as well.
What Type of Gap Exists When The Delivery of a Service Fails to Meet Customers’ Expectations?
A communication gap is present when a company fails to deliver the services promised to customers. If a customer is expecting to receive insurance for his/her new car and the contract did not include that coverage, this would be considered a gap in service delivery.
What Changes Have You Seen in Your Company’s Business Practices Since The Birth of Social Media?
Since it has been proven time and again that people trust authority more than what companies say about themselves, more companies are using outside endorsements from celebrities or other third parties to promote their product lines. Marketers should look into such tactics to meet and exceed expectations of customers.
To Meet or Exceed Customers’ Expectations Marketers Must:
1. Understand customer needs and wants
Though many marketers may already be aware of this, to meet or exceed customers’ expectations marketers must note that understanding your customers’ wants and needs is essential for you to develop a strong marketing strategy and provide excellent customer service.
By gaining insights into what drives and influences customer actions and decisions, you can tailor your campaigns to meet their requirements and engage with them on an emotional level through different tactics.
Customer Relationship Management Systems are an excellent way of gaining insight into your customers and can be used to help you implement tailored campaigns to meet customer service expectations.
2. Create a compelling brand narrative
A key component of any effective marketing strategy and meeting customer service expectations is creating a strong narrative for your brand that resonates with the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers. A great way to do this and improve service quality is by using emotive language and imagery as well as focusing on the human aspects of branding such as progress, emotions, and relationships. This will allow you to connect with your audience on an emotional level and generate interest in your products or services.
There’s no need to sell! You can draw people in and exceed customers’ expectations through storytelling – simply provide them with the tools required to create their ending (the purchase).
3. Use adaptive approach in marketing
Having a successful marketing strategy is great, but what would you do if your customer expectations changed? Who knows what the future holds, whether it’s new technology or competitor altering the game. Customer service today compared to a few years ago is way more competitive. Customer experience is what it all comes down to.
To provide great customer service and empower customers, one must be ready to adopt different strategies.
4. Don’t rely solely on advertising
This one can’t be stressed enough! You may have a huge library of adverts under your belt but there is no way you could create them all yourself, especially when you have so many other important things to handle! So, what should marketers do to combat this issue?
They should make sure that they invest in more than advertising and focus on improving customer experience.
5. Make sure you have a clear strategy
A little tip that can make all the difference! If your company lacks direction, it’ll lose its way very quickly and end up flopping like an undercooked pancake. When you’re trying to figure out the best path for your company, it’s always good to ask yourself questions like; what makes my organization unique? What does success look like to me? Is there anything stopping my organization from achieving its goals right now?
The more thought you put into these questions, the better chance you have of finding a winning strategy!
6. Value customer feedback
Don’t forget to consider the impact of customer feedback. This is one of the best ways to determine what you should focus on to improve customer experience and provide service quality. This can be done through questionnaires, focus groups, and surveys. There are many ways to get customer feedback through constant contact with customers.
When developing your plan, keep in mind that no company has all the answers so don’t be afraid to ask for help!
7. Stand out among competitors
Now, this sounds obvious, doesn’t it? However, many businesses fall into the trap of using similar or even identical materials to advertise their products or services. As such, more often than not (when creating an advertisement campaign for instance), marketers need to work extra hard to make sure everything is different and unique. This way they can avoid accidentally promoting similar brands at the same time as themselves.
8. Continuously improve the customer experience
Lack of improvement is the number one reason why customers are annoyed with companies and marketers fail to meet customer’s expectations in a timely manner. Occasionally, marketers may get to a point where they feel like there’s nothing else, they can do, and they can’t create opportunities (when it comes to improving their product or service). However, this couldn’t be further from the truth!
Even if marketers have managed to master all other aspects of marketing (e.g., branding, advertising); to meet or exceed customers’ expectations marketers must find ways to improve how their customers experience their product or service (e.g., upgrading the store layout or order process).
9. Initiate customer success and retention strategies
Customer retention is critical to customer health. Assuring customer satisfaction is the basis for rapid growth. Statistics demonstrate that the cost of buying or retaining a new customer at 5 times as much. It is much simpler to retain clients using Customer Experience Management software.
The solution offers the additional benefit of discovering upsell and cross-selling potential in addition to maximizing the success of customers. Unfortunately, most firms have no idea how they are supposed to retain a particular customer.
Why Is It Important to Have Multiple Marketing Strategies?
Experts believe in making sure they are prepared for any changes; therefore, they use multiple strategies to market their products and services across different platforms. This will help meet higher expectations and give you a competitive advantage. For example, if you’re an online business then perhaps advertising on social media would be your best bet, while offline businesses might opt for TV ads instead. Whatever floats your sales boat!
The sales team plays a significant role in making marketing strategies successful and fruitful. If you’re a business owner, it’s important to periodically coach your sales team on the ins and outs of marketing. This will help them to improve their efforts and better achieve your desired results.
Role of Sales Team in Marketing
Most of the time, sales reps are taught how to sell, but not necessarily how to market. This is something that needs to be addressed by managers and directors alike. Once both your marketing and sales teams understand each other, they can work more effectively together on projects that will help your business grow.
How To Coach Your Sales Team to Improve Marketing Efforts
There are many ways in which you can coach your team members to better market their products or services. Here are a few effective coaching techniques:
1. Conduct a training session
Ask your team what areas they need help with – this way you’ll be able to tailor future sessions accordingly. You can also provide them with some reading materials or links to relevant articles so that everyone is up to date on the latest marketing strategies.
2. Teach them about your target market
It’s important that your team understands the demographic they’re targeting. This way, they can better market to those needs and be able to effectively answer any questions from potential clients.
3. Talk about social media
Nowadays, everyone is on social media – so make sure your team knows how it works and what kind of posts will result in conversions. You should also train them on how to deal with negative feedback.
4. Have a Q&A session
Once a week or once a month, ask your team for feedback on their projects and strategies. If they have experienced positive results from something you did then let them know you appreciate it! If there was a problem with something they’ve done, try not to get upset but instead counsel them and teach them how to improve their performance. This will do wonders for your team’s performance!
5. The follow-Up
One of the biggest problems sales representatives face is not following up once they get in touch with a lead. Teach your employees and team to send a steady flow on important leads and check-in if there’s been no response or engagement after an extended period.
6. Deal with rejection like a pro
Rejections are something we will all experience at some point in our lives and we need to learn how to deal with them professionally. How do you deal with customer rejection? When you’re selling your pitch make sure you emphasize the importance of your product, but human resources must coach the sales team to handle rejection professionally. Professionalism is also important when aiming to exceed customer expectations.
Closing Thoughts About What Marketers Must Do to Meet or Exceed Customers’ Expectations
As a marketer, it’s important to remember that you are not working in a vacuum. You are always competing for customers’ attention and business, and for brands to be successful, you need to meet and exceed customer expectations through carefully planned strategies and their effective implementation!
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