Today, a digital marketer does not have to convince every client about the versatility of digital marketing. Well-informed clients know that digital marketing can help them in:
- Reaching a larger audience
- Targeting prospects most likely to buy your product or service
- Saving money on traditional advertising
- Leveraging the unique opportunities to measure success on a daily basis and change track to affect performance
Therefore, getting clients is only half the battle…
The challenge lies in retaining
The digital agency space is super competitive. Still, there is a slice for everyone in this $322 billion industry. Moreover, the market space in Australia is quite conducive for the growth of smaller and niche digital marketers.
The new business enables scaling of operations and revenue increase. Consequently, digital marketers get to hire more staff and service bigger clients. Building up this steady stream of high-quality new leads is the major push towards growth goals.
Now, along with acquiring new business leads, increasing customer retention rates is also vital. Just a 5% customer retention rate can increase profits by 25-95%. Therefore, evaluating customer loyalty strategies is also a big part of growth. What is the best way to implement both?
Let’s look at some important tips to help keep customers as a digital marketer:
- Develop a set of onboarding procedures. It offers a professional outlook and ensures consistent service.
- Know your customer. This includes general client information, their goals and expectations, branding and marketing information, business and industry information, and brand assets and account details. In short, a digital marketer should understand a client’s business better to put in use the right tactics in marketing.
- Update an integrated marketing mix. From SEO to PPC, social media, etc. the right digital marketing tools help to run effective campaigns. Develop expertise in using them and applying the insights in the right context. Customers will appreciate positive results and continue their business.
- Use positive social proof to retain loyal customers. It is an effective strategy for getting people to listen. Build an online presence on social media networks of relevance. It is also good for identifying new customers and prospects.
- Giving back to customers is rewarded by repeat business. This does not have to be costly, even small gestures can build reciprocity.
- Offer a personalised experience to the customers. Create a one-to-one marketing experience for customers. It makes clients appreciate the effort made in devising a strategy that increased relevance and engagement.
- Exceptional customer service retains customers. It even appeals to new customers to come on board. Customers engage with courteous, helpful, and willing service providers. A digital marketer must remember that quality is more important than speed.
- Rank for your target keywords in your local area. Leverage the local SEO to rank higher in terms of service together with location terms such as city, territory, province, etc. Claim GMB profiles, post local updates. Customers feel better about widely recognised service providers. It brings trust in the working relationship.
- Use networking to become an expert in the local community. Build relationships over time with business owners in the local area. Encourage them to approach you for advice. Work towards an image of the go-to digital expert. This strategy will provide long-term value in endearing customers since people trust others recommendations.
- Build relationships with authority figures in your niche. Interacting with leaders and influencers in the preferred niche eventually posits you as key player as well. This makes keeping customers easy as they see you as a niche authority.
- Ask clients for feedback. This helps in understanding detraction.
- Appreciate loyal customers on social media. Make them feel special for supporting you. It will earn you extra social currency as well as encourage word-of-mouth publicity.
Acknowledge customers as people you value greatly. Place their concerns before pure profit and they will be happy to continue the collaboration. These tips will help to initiate genuine interactions with customers.
Choose what works best for you as a digital marketer. It may seem overwhelming to implement all of them, so at Local Digital, we suggest focusing on one tip to begin with.
Every tip deserves dedicated time and resources to produce results. And, results — in the form of increased loyalty for your product or service — is what you’re looking for.