Have You Misplaced Your Customer?
When I lose something, I go back to the last place and moment in my head where I remembered having it. Have you lost your customers? Do you know where they are? Do you know where they spend their time? If you don’t know these things, how can you ever be able to talk to them?
But I digress. The channels that brands used to use in order to communicate with their customers used to be pretty simple: TV, Radio, Billboards, direct mail and similar. These were all pretty simple, one-to-many broadcast mechanisms. You typically would create a message which enticed your prospects to your product, and you hoped that describing enough features, benefits, improved lifestyle etc., in some static ad, or even TV commercial. You created the message, on the medium you wanted to, then sent it out. Measurement came in if your customers were actually willing to tell you where they say your ad. Very little if any data.
It’s a very different game today. First of all, the number of channels in which your conversation can take place have grown exponentially. Add email, text ads, banner ads, message forums, website ads, then eventually social networks and blogs, and you get a crazy, intense number of ways in which you can converse with your customer. Not only that, before, your customer was typically in one or two places when they consumed the ad, at home or at work and rarely somewhere else. Nowadays, you can and probably will have that conversation with the customer is any location, at any time of the day or night.
Customer conversations are gone from “business hours” to whenever and wherever they want to engage with you.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that typically, people don’t want to go to your website. They aren’t interested in developing any kind of relationship with you. The just want you to provide what you are going to provide, and at a fair and reasonable price. They typically already know everything about you, your company, your poor customer service stories, your awesome customer service stories, and your products. They’ve already made the decision to buy your product, even before they contact you. And if they haven’t made the decision yet, it’s usually because there is one specific key piece of information that they are looking for and it’s not available on your website, or anywhere else.
They want to make their decision about going with your product before they even contacted you. On the flip side, if they DO contact you, then they are pretty much a hot lead and are ready to buy.
Where are your customers? More likely they spend time on social media more than anywhere else on the internet. In fact, it’s been shown that most users experience the internet through only 5 specific sites: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay & Amazon. This is where most of the world is on the internet. It may not be your specific niche, but this is typically where they are.
And if you are talking to your customers where they are, then why aren’t you? What is stopping you from engaging both your current customers and prospects on the mediums they are so familiar with?