Marketing is two-way

One of the problems in the marketing and advertising world is that those responsible for creating it, are too far removed from the recipient. If an ad agency is focused on the creative side without the input of those that they are trying to reach, it will fail.

So you have to make your marketing process a two way street. Fortunately with the social media tools that continue to become available, it is getting easier and easier. The THINKing blog wrote more on this subject:

THINKing

Listening: Marketing’s Secret Weapon

Customers know you and your business better than you think, and often better than you. In the many strategic planning projects I’ve done over nearly 30 years in the business, the customer always gives me the nugget that frames a client’s positioning.

Customers will tell you when you are doing something right or something wrong. All you have to do is listen to them. This rarely happens in businesses of any size. And guess what? Chief marketing officers at 500 major corporations know this. A study by the CMO Council suggests,

…marketers don’t know how to use customer input to improve operations, products and processes. The council, whose study, “Giving Customer Voice More Volume,” surveyed around 500 senior marketers at major corporations, found that only 33% of survey respondents said their companies claim to be good at handling customer complaints. Of the executives who responded to the survey, only 23% said their companies track or measure customer emails, and only 17% use that feedback to identify potential customer advocates.

The customer “custodian” function is one of the most critical in marketing, says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. Neale-May adds that the CMO must,

“own every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time. It is mind-boggling to me that the level of attention to this is not what it should be, and fragmented in terms of who owns it.”

If you really want to listen to your customers, you need to track and propagate positive word of mouth, as well as gather insight from all customer engagement and integrate that insight into the marketing process. So, are you listening to your customer? Tell us about it.

Sphere: Related Content