Due to all the big technological advancements in recent years, the majority of businesses are now losing sight of how important it is to connect with clients and maintain good relationships through content marketing. In the world where everything is quickly becoming completely automated, valuable connections are bound to slowly disappear.
That is why we want to provide you with some of the most important reasons why connecting with clients in crucial in 2018, for both your business’s success and your clients’ satisfaction.
The importance of connections
1. Loyalty
When you are thinking about just how crucial customer connections are, you need to discover what behaviors attribute to customer loyalty. When businesses directly deal with their clients, strong interpersonal relationships are formed through content marketing.
For instance, in a situation where a business chooses one vendor over the others, that vendor dedicates all of their efforts to ensuring that the business stays with them, which leads to customer loyalty. That loyalty can be so strong that if a client is thinking about turning to another vendor, they will first check if there is a way to still stay in business with their current vendor.
2. Social media platforms
Social media can serve as a way for your customers to show their dissatisfaction. That way, even a simple mistake can escalate into the worst nightmare of your public relations team in no time. However, it also provides a great opportunity for you to connect with your clients in a positive way.
In a situation where a client posts about a negative experience they’ve had with your company, you will have the ability to contact them and see what went wrong and how it can possibly be resolved. Sometimes, simply admitting that a mistake was made can take you a long way – bad publicity can quickly change into positive publicity if a client appreciates the way you handled the situation and posts favorable comments about it.
3. Innovations
The importance of connecting with your clients can also be recognized in terms of innovation. Software companies provide a great way to connect with their clients by creating forums where they can discuss the services or products they are using and even come up with the desired features they would like to see in the later versions of those services or products.
Implementing this method shows your clients that their input is valuable, and helps you understand their needs better. Since businesses use their current client base as their focus group, any insights are very useful when making decisions about manufacturing.
The importance of buyer’s journey
The definition of the buyer’s journey is: “the active research process a buyer goes through leading up to a purchase”. Simplified, it is everything that a client needs to do before making a definite decision whether to purchase something from you.
Reportedly, 67% of your client’s decision is complete before they even reach out to sales. The majority of buyers acquire the information they need by themselves. Having that in mind, what you can do is to be there when they are looking for that information.
By providing them with valuable content and answers every step of the way, you will be able to ensure that their decision is made in your favor. Giving your leads what they need at every stage and supplying them with your guidance instead of forcing them to make a decision will help you gain their trust.
When talking about buyer’s journey, it is important to emphasize that it has 4 distinct stages – awareness stage, consideration stage, decision stage and post-purchase stage.
4. In the post-purchase stage, you want your clients to come back again, so at this point, your goals should be the following: turning your customers into repeat customers, maximizing customer value, reducing customer churn and improving your branding.
How content marketing helps you build connections
Content marketing refers to the process of increasing your customer base with the use of high-quality content. However, it is much more than just creating and distributing the content. In fact, when done properly, content marketing can turn you into an influencer.
As already mentioned, the vast majority of people researches services or products online on their own before making any purchases. That is why it is important to provide your clients with great content to help them make the best decision.
Reportedly, consumers are now significantly less responsive to old-school sales methods and advertising – in fact, about 70% of them prefer learning about products through articles rather than through advertisements.
Effective content marketing will help you build strong relationships with your clients without having to implement “hard sell” methods. Good content marketing shows your expertise, helps you gain trust, and draws traffic to your social media accounts and your website, which all eventually results in strong client connections and the overall success of your business.
To sum up, what matters the most when it comes to any business are the people using your services or products. The success of your business largely depends on their satisfaction, which is based on the quality of your mutual connection. If you want to excel in your area of expertise, the number one thing to invest in is the relationship with your clients, and this article serves as a tool that will help you achieve that.
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