A 2020 MARKETING WORD
Observe and be empathetic
Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
I believe that the majority of our target market wants more human experiences. I read that three out of four buyers are more loyal to businesses that give them the option to interact with a human than to those with a fully automated digital experience.
While the digital experience has been the “go to” offer to our customers, I believe that the next five years will see resurgence in personal customer interaction. That will require the establishment of personal relationships with our customers and target market.
So what does that mean?
- It means that your focus has to be on delivering a great customer experience instead of just a product or service.
- Work on building loyalty between you and your customers
- Be authentic when showing yourself to your customers and target market. Be yourself – everyone else is taken.
- Focus on developing long term relationships; look ahead 10 years or more.
- Work to become a trusted advisor. The key point is that trust must be earned and deserved.
- Believe that success in developing customer relationships is tied to the accumulation of quality experiences.
Our marketing must evolve from order taking to order making. It is your job as a small business owner to place yourselves in a higher place and concentrate on how to grow a sustainable business.
By developing empathy you can develop and market products and services for your customers. Observing how customers use products and services, and listening to them talk about the products and services they need can make coming up with marketing actions a lot easier.
“Both Akio Morita of Sony and Steve Jobs were famous for never commissioning market research,” writes James Allworth in Harvard Business Review, who calls empathy the most important thing he learned at Harvard Business School. “Instead they’d just walk around the world watching what people did. They’d put themselves in the shoes of their customers.”
I know that every small business person has “empathy” as a goal, but now is the time to make it a major part of your long term marketing plan.
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Tips & Advice by Nick Petra, CFP – Founder of Strategic Duck and BizQuack
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