When we use storytelling in our marketing efforts, making the customer the hero of our stories, then we can build community and be remembered.
Content Marketing – Give your Customers Something of Value
It’s not enough to just build community through Social Media channels. To grab and hold your customer’s interest you need to provide them with something of value. By focusing on Content Marketing you can provide quality content for specific customer personas and deliver it where they will find it.
Innovation – Start with Customer Pain Points
nnovation begins with listening to and understanding your customer pain points. Rather than focusing on trying to create first and then convince people they need what you are offering. If we create what they need, then it will be more easily adopted by the market.
Oops. How to deliver bad news.
One hard earned skill that I’ve developed from years of deploying bleeding edge technologies is the art of how to deliver bad news. I call it an art because this is often really difficult for a lot of people. People naturally want to be known for their successes, not the pot holes and speed bumps in the road. It takes a certain amount of confidence to admit that there is a problem and we have to address it.
Building Customer’s Trust
I believe that strong customer engagement requires the ability to build trust based relationships with customers through delivering on managed expectations. This is basically a lot of words for saying that I believe you need to “walk the talk”. For me the building of the relationship must have its foundation in the trust that I will let the customer know what I intend to do for them and then doing it.
When to deliver that one-off large customer feature request
We’ve all been there. The customer from #$@! That demanding squeaky wheel customer who wants what you don’t have in the product today and they want it yesterday. The customer who pushes your limits on scarce resources – people, time and costs. Then sitting on your side of the table, there are equal pressures. The account team that commits you to the inhumanly possible to satisfy their biggest customer. The development team behind the front lines who wants to pull on the breaks because of the competing requests on their time. And yet somehow, between managing everyone’s expectations and a stellar team, you deliver.
