By Maria Elena Duron
Originally, brand loyalty was the sole bread and butter of company revenue. With reviews spreading by word of mouth, it would take the better part of a year for new names to gain any sort of financial traction–if they managed to accrue positive revenue at all.
However, the rise of the mobile phone has all but sealed the fate of brand loyalty, with professionals viewing each new smartphone user as yet another nail in loyalty’s proverbial coffin.
Interestingly enough, it’s not that the marketing has become some atrocious thing people don’t listen to; it’s the fact that there’s just too much of it. Every company claims they are the best, and every brand will change how you think. It’s the old conundrum that when everyone is unique, no one is.
Because of this, people have begun tuning out age-old marketing messages in favor of the one thing they know they can rely on: customer reviews.
The Sticky
In today’s modern day marketing, you can no longer expect to grow a loyal following that will remain loyal for their entire lives. After all, the layoffs of the early 2000s proved that businesses were far from faithful to their employees, destroying the once held practice of unquestioned loyalty to the younger, technologically-driven generations.
Instead, the new customer that businesses should hope to attract is known as being “sticky.” Customers may not follow you forever, but while they are with you, they will support your brand by continually buying your product and telling their friends about it.
As their role is different from the loyal customers of shopping days past, so, too, is the way they are drawn in. As discussed, today’s customers aren’t interested in hearing about every brand being the best brand. From this, we can extrapolate that anything having to do with the company is boring, especially if we accept the assumption that Millennials are far more narcissistic than previous generations.
In short, to attract the stickies, you need to brand your marketing for them; you need to make it about them. The way you do this? Decision simplicity.
Decision Simplicity
With two-thirds of Americans now wielding smartphones, and over half of those owners readily admitting they could not live without their devices, making their lives easier through your entire marketing setup is now what makes sales. You are saving people time; therefore, they will turn to you for assistance, even if they don’t end up purchasing anything. The key to winning this game is through reviews.
Nearly 27 percent of all smartphone users access reviews with their phones. Before they invest any money, these users want to know what others think of a product. After all, other customers aren’t trying to sell them anything, unlike the companies.
Because of this, the inherent distrust in marketing has inevitably steered Millennials toward a marketing that does best when it features every review, positive and negative, front and center.
It’s important to note that both positive and negative reviews must remain posted. Consumers are now trained to be extremely wary of brands that have nothing other than stellar 5-star reviews gracing their pages. It’s the negative views that actually give a company an appearance of trustworthiness. An unbiased listing allows every user to take in the potential pros and cons to weigh the risk; it also acts as evidence that even at its worst, the company is still one of the best.
On the other side of this equation is the ease of access your users have to a feedback system. While the first thing people do in the morning is check their phones, and the last thing they do before going to bed, few will remember to post a review even one hour after visiting a store.
For good or for bad, you want your customers able to leave notes to others, especially those that are sticky. If posting reviews is easy enough, you’ll have customers getting the word out about your brand while they’re still interacting with you.
Small Steps
Big business typically has no problem implementing such a practice. With all of the millions poured into their marketing departments, they can come out with new review systems in less than a month.
Even against such powerhouses, smaller companies need to invest in their own powerhouse systems if they’re going to make enough of an impact to carve out a successful niche in the business community. More importantly, they’ll want a convenient mobile phone review client so that more people can easily start generating review buzz.
Even if it’s through a third-party site, the power of recommendations is not something that can be ignored. With so many turning to them as a legitimate way of judging the value of a brand before investing in it, the faster you can build proof of your constant and superior service, the more influence you will indirectly have on those trying to decide between you and another, similar company.
A simple example is a restaurant search. Most look to Google to find local names followed by reviews. Those with no reviews are overlooked in favor of places with higher ratings. These ratings serve as a guarantee that money won’t be wasted even if the unrated place down the street is better.
Marketing has remained a constantly evolving aspect of the business world. Though it continues to shift, mobile technology has caused a major change of direction that not even the biggest names could have predicted. Nowadays, people know to trust in only those names that come with positive reviews, relying on strangers’ words as a reliable compass to steer them past poor investments even as they navigate a store.
All that’s left up to you to see returns is to provide your clientele the power and knowledge gleaned from an adaptive mobile review system.
Maria Elena Duron is Marketing Coach with Know, Like + Ignite. She works with restaurants, realtors, rejuvenators, and renegades to get more positive reviews, recommendations, referrals, and revenue. She received the Texas Governor’s Award for Excellence in Business and leads one of the top six Twitter chats in the world: #brandchat. Take the uncertainty out of how your personal and business brand delivers business–Get Your Checklist.
The post How to Win the Trust and Loyalty of Todays Mobile Customer appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post How to Win the Trust and Loyalty of Todays Mobile Customer appeared first on AllBusiness.com.