Focusing on your products or services is a marketing strategy that’s been used and reused. If you want to stand out from the crowd, demonstrate your customers that you share their beliefs and values.
For decades, marketing has been a volume-driven game, more emails, more ad placements and bigger billboards. Of course, the goal is to capture the attention of as many people as possible and to achieve a supersaturated share of mind.
Nowadays, this type of strategy is dropping in importance in favor of customer engagement, genuine dialogue, and alignment with customers’ beliefs and values.
More than just a vendor!
Of course, you will continue doing everything you can to service customers, including being able to scale your marketing activities. But just as important is doing whatever it takes to authentically communicate the company’s core beliefs through every marketing channel and customer interaction.
Why is this so important? Because you have to consistently and constantly communicate to customers not just what you do, but also what you stand for.
Also, when customers have the same belief as you, it becomes significantly easier to do all the things a company wants and needs to do. Service disruptions generate fewer hard feelings. And an incident here and there has less impact because customers know your company is in sync with their beliefs. They see you as more than just a vendor, you’re a partner.
The focus must be on the customers!
We all know that a business succeeds or fails based on how much value it delivers to customers. Connecting with customer beliefs is an increasingly critical way to deliver value. There is no single touch point that can communicate everything that your business is about. It must be communicated over time, all the time, by everyone in the company.
Because marketing is normally responsible, directly or indirectly, for a customer’s first encounter with an enterprise, it is up to this department to lead the charge and be responsible for every touch point along a customer journey.
The marketing department needs to step up and ensure that every employee is:
– engaged in the beliefs of the company and able to communicate them appropriately in every customer encounter;
– cares more about customers and their situations than whatever is going on in the business, because the focus must be on the customers.
More and more buyers choose to buy based on their beliefs and choose to walk away from other brands based on those same ideals. That’s why businesses will have no choice but to pay attention to the values of their audiences and work to fulfill them.