By Matt Boyce, Head of SMB Marketing, Podium

You know that your business needs to retain customers and grow. Every company, regardless of industry or business, wants to grow and sell more of its products or services. This requires you to develop marketing strategies. In addition to your general marketing strategies, be sure to include customer marketing strategies as well.

These strategies will help you better understand your customers. You can then use that deeper understanding of them to adjust your overall marketing strategy or find areas for improvement within your business itself. While all the customer marketing strategies we outline in this post can help with customer acquisition, they also can help with customer retention. This is important, as increasing your customer retention by just 5% can lead to an increase in profits of between 25% and 95%.

What Is Customer Marketing?

As a business owner, you are always on the lookout for ways to increase business and increase your client base, as well as sell more to existing clients. How you choose to pursue this is called marketing. Traditional marketing is all about bringing new customers, whereas customer marketing is about keeping your customers long-term and helping them reach their financial potential with your business.

Traditional marketing is about getting you noticed and in the potential customer's mind. Customer marketing differs in that it is about making your overall customer experience better through the years. Customer marketing is primarily aimed at creating loyalty, retention and a sense of community. Whereas traditional marketing is built off the idea that a business cannot grow without new customers coming through the doors regularly, customer marketing comes from the idea that maintaining customer loyalty is just as important for business growth as generating new customers.

Customer Marketing Strategies to Promote Growth and Success for Business

The best way to improve your business is to understand it inside and out. Proper research will go a long way in helping with any marketing. It will ensure you are marketing correctly and that you have the right tools available. Grouping some of your research in small parts will help you get a better understanding of where and how to market to your customers.

Strategy #1: Your success rate.

You need to understand your demographic to understand the best way of retaining your clients. If you know your target audience well, you can market directly to them. Do not be afraid to give out a survey to learn why your best customers keep coming back. Look at your data and analytics of customers/clients that do use your business and why they keep coming back. Look for trends in the research to create the perfect customer profile.

In addition, it's important to learn what your customers want when they come to you in the first place. Do they come back because you have the lowest prices? The most inventory? If you have already run marketing campaigns, take the time to mine the data. Did you receive any new customers from this work? Which advertisements have worked best?

Strategy #2: Customer segmentation enhances your success rate.

Once you have an established routine of gathering data, you can start to sort it into categories so your customers can get messages that are more tailored to their needs. Podium has campaign software that is particularly helpful for this type of organizing. If your customer purchased a product and you're getting something in that will complement it or is similar, you can create mailing lists for these customers. You can do this with text messaging as well. This type of marketing receives a better response rate because the message is tailored to the client more specifically with personalization.

Strategy #3: Feedback and constant communication enhance customer retention.

You need to build a bond with your customers. This is not done through automated text messages that sound like a robot wrote them. Instead, take the constructive feedback from customers into consideration. This can make a large impact on their bond with you.

Customers need to feel personally connected to companies with which they closely work. You will need to establish safe places for your customers to provide feedback. There are online programs suited well for this. Think of this technology as a modern version of comment cards. The concept is the same: You provide a spot where your customers can leave an anonymous message about their experience. Once you have this feedback, use it.

If someone says your bags always rip, seek out a new bag provider. If a staff member is lackluster, have a meeting, and if that doesn't work, replace them. To see real, quality growth, you need to establish a highway of back-and-forth. The customers know what they like and do not like. Your business strives to have more of the former and less of the latter. It becomes an ideal situation in which not growing is virtually impossible.

Strategy #4: Optimize your online presence.

There is no doubt that the online world has opened many doors for businesses, especially with marketing and brand advocates. Now you can reach a much larger customer base for a fraction of what it cost to market years ago. The internet also makes getting your customer data easier. Whether it is tracking addresses or answering comments on social media accounts, it can all be accessed all the time, from multiple devices.

Make sure you establish Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, and learn about internet marketing. While it may not seem necessary, it is especially important. Establish an updated, strong website and keep it active. Learn about SEO and advertise locally to bring more traffic to your business. Fill in your information to every available account, such as Google My Business, Yelp and the rest. Keep your social media accounts posting regularly and available to your clients. Learn to cross-sell products through your platforms. Update posts with information about sales you have going on and the latest happenings at your practice. These are all steps that will help build the customer experience. Your clients will want you to be available, and these avenues make it possible, allowing your business to become more customer-centric.

Strategy #5: Customer engagement.
Whether or not throwing a barbecue for your customers is your thing, you need to find a way to bring them together. Customer marketing means you want to create a solid relationship built on trust, so your customers keep coming back over the years. It is about making sure you are communicating changes in your business regularly, reporting when items are on sale and letting your customers know what you are doing in the community.

It means more than that, though—your online presence and your review quality will also make a difference in how the client views your business. In fact, engagement online is arguably as important as in-person engagement.

When you have an established online presence, you need to make sure your messages and streams are regularly attended to. Current customers will not understand if you have always been attentive but aren't with your messaging systems. If someone comments or asks a question, it should always be responded to in a reasonable amount of time. Encourage your happy customers to leave positive reviews. This will help to filter your business into more searches.

Create opportunities for your customers to discuss things they do. If you have a dental practice, for example, consider opening a discussion about the type of toothpaste everyone uses. Getting engagement on your media pages may seem difficult at first, but once you have it started, it will have a bit of a snowball effect.

Find causes for your business to give to. Local causes are great and help your business establish its roots in the community. Create fundraisers that allow an opportunity for your business to raise an amount and donate to an established charity or someone in need. These fundraisers can be events where clients socialize. There also can be opportunities to host online events around charitable causes.

Conclusion: Getting and Retaining Customers Is the Backbone of Your Business

Encouraging ways of relating to your new customers will certainly help build your business. Make sure you create a rock-solid standard operating procedure that can grow with your company. From there, create a solid plan for growth and community participation and work that plan. Get the tools you need to organize your customer data so you can provide what they are looking for. Gather some information about your clientele, create a solid online presence with social media, and establish and work a solid line of communication. Then, your business-client relationship will be well on its way to having a strong foundation.

Podium helps you gather much of the information and keep it organized and useful. It also can offer help with reviews, thus boosting your reputation online and your marketing program.

Podium is a customer messaging platform that enables companies with a local presence to conveniently connect with their customers at critical touchpoints to help them strengthen their business. By conveniently facilitating millions of customer interactions, such as driving customer-generated online reviews and providing improved customer messaging tools, Podium serves more than 45,000 local businesses in the United States, Canada and Australia.