Customer Service as a Marketing Strategy

When you’re writing down your marketing strategy objectives, you’re unlikely to prioritize customer service as a key player. We’re here to tell you not to underestimate this aspect of marketing.

Customer service and marketing have historically been viewed as separate entities. However, using them together has can produce better, more successful results — from beginning to end.

Your marketing team should be utilizing every aspect of your business when developing a marketing strategy. And customer service marketing is an essential element.

How Does Customer Service Benefit Your Marketing Strategy?

At first glance, customer service and marketing appear to be disparate efforts.

Customer Service	Marketing
- Customer Retention - Keeping the customers you already have	- Customer Acquisition - Getting new customers to buy into your product, brand, or company

A more in-depth look into the foundations of both of these elements shows how well one flows into the other.

By combining the efforts of marketing and customer service teams, you can create a mutually beneficial relationship.

Your business can use customer service as a marketing strategy by learning from customers you already have. Look at buying trends, customer reviews, and social media interactions.

Your marketing team can then use this knowledge in future selling campaigns by developing new marketing initiatives tailored to current customers’ likes and interests.

Ultimately, this will help retain the interest of the customers you already have while bringing in like-minded potential customers.

Good Customer Service Begets Great Customer Reviews

Any prosperous business knows customer reviews can have a big impact on your success. In the age of social media, where customer experience has a global reach, it’s even more critical to ensure customer satisfaction and translate this into positive customer reviews.

One of the best ways to do this is by turning your customers into your biggest fans.

You should do everything you can to make sure your customers are satisfied. Your customer service should be as attentive and responsive as possible.

Deal with customer service issues quickly and effectively to reap the rewards of positive reviews.

We’ve listed a couple of the best ways to do this below.

Chatbots

Chatbots are one of the best new programs for customer service. Just take a look at some of the reviews for the popular “ChatBot” on Capterra.

Great for smaller businesses with less human resources, chatbots simulate human conversation and answer customer queries using AI software. Here are some of the helpful benefits a chatbot offers:

⦁ One of the top marketing trends for 2020, according to The Digital Marketing Podcast
⦁ Provides 24/7 customer service
⦁ Chatbots can answer simple questions posed by customers
⦁ Chatbots can transfer customers through to real people for more complex queries
⦁ Using a chatbot creates more simplicity for customers
⦁ Providing the option to speak to a real customer service adviser maintains the element of personalization and diligence

Social Media

Social media is possibly the best tool to interact with your customer base and provide a responsive service to gain positive reviews.

Over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide in 2020. This global reach is encouraging for digital marketing campaigns.

From a customer service perspective, global reach means more eyes on your business.

Ensuring you’re providing excellent customer service on social media is very important for brand recognition and a positive reputation. Here’s what you stand to gain by leveraging social media:

⦁ A more casual, friendlier approach to customer service
⦁ Provides 24/7 customer service
⦁ Customer queries can be answered almost instantly
⦁ Inquiries and issues are resolved publicly and broadcasted to a wider audience
⦁ Easily manage posts via a social media management tool such as ⦁ MarketPlan’s Live Analytics or an app such as Hootsuite

By becoming renowned for your customer service and providing an exceptional customer experience, you can use positive reviews as promotional material for a fantastic marketing strategy.

We’ll talk more about how exactly you can use positive reviews as sales material below.

Generate Buzz

Getting people talking about your conscientious customer service efforts is one of the most cost-effective strategies.

Creating a “buzz” for your customer service through “digitized word of mouth” (i.e., social media discussions and online reviews) is its own kind of marketing campaign.

The best part is, it’s completely free!

The Ideal Scenario

A happy customer leaves a good review.
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A potential customer reads this review and is likely to see it as a trustworthy, authentic evaluation of your business and service.
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This potential customer is encouraged by the positive experience of the original customer.
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The potential customer makes an inquiry or purchase and is converted into a happy, paying customer.
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Your business has generated a new sale, for free, through the great review left by the original customer.
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The new customer leaves their own positive review after receiving their own personalized, excellent customer service from your customer service team.

Following the progression from review to the website, it’s easy to pinpoint where to focus your marketing and customer service efforts.

1. Ensure that your business's selling strategy takes on a customer-centric focus, providing an outstanding customer service experience.
2. At the same time, focus on building and perfecting a professional and accessible website, which will further encourage the customer into making a final sale.

Maintain Communication Between Your Marketing and Customer Service Teams

When a customer has a query about a specific promotion, product, or service that your business offers — they call customer service.

If your customer service team has no idea what the customer is talking about, it doesn’t bode well for the interaction.

You need to make sure your business has a seamless communication channel between its customer service and marketing teams.

This is an essential piece for maintaining a professional and organized reputation.

It’s also convenient to track the target audience's reception of a particular campaign or product.

Customer service representatives can report on customer experiences.

The customer service department needs to be aware of:	The marketing department needs to be aware of:
- New campaigns - New deals - New Promotions - New Products - New Services	- Customer response to a campaign or product, both positive and negative - Any misleading or ambiguous aspects of a campaign or product

The customer service department needs to be aware of: The marketing department needs to be aware of:

Creating a mutually beneficial relationship between the customer service and marketing departments ultimately results in a clear and coherent, customer-centric approach to your business campaign.

Using a business tool such as MarketPlan is a fantastic way to simplify communication within your business.

MarketPlan includes a connected Kanban. Your team can connect directly with each other on one shared platform, allowing everyone to see actual progress from individuals in real-time. You can assign, comment, and notify — all in one place!

Use Marketing to Map Buyer Personas

Customer service forms a direct line to your business’s current and potential customer demographic’s needs, wants, interests, and behaviors.

A focus on customer service as part of your wider strategy makes it easier to map user behavior and create your customer base’s buyer persona.

Note: A “buyer persona” is a fictional representation of your target customers. Creating a buyer persona is essential in the early stages of planning your marketing strategy.

To formulate the perfect marketing strategy, you need first to understand who you are targeting. You can know your customers by:

⦁ Age
⦁ Location
⦁ Gender
⦁ Interests
⦁ Needs
⦁ Employment details
⦁ Any other aspects specific to your business, brand, service, or product

Sure, you can get a lot of this information from the analytics of past campaigns. They’re important. But numbers can’t tell you everything.

Customer service talks to your business’s target demographic all the time. Arguably, they know more about your customers than any other department.

It is so important to utilize this resource. Integrate what your customer services team is learning about your current customers into your marketing strategy.

Your marketing team can match specific marketing campaign elements to appeal to the target customers’ distinct behaviors. In doing so, you can improve product development, introduce niche services, and create a more consistent brand voice.

Encourage Relatable Content Creation by the Marketing Team

Content creation is an integral part of your marketing strategy. It is important to have exciting and engaging information on your website, social media platforms, and other marketing materials. This helps safeguard customer attention and retention.

We now know how valuable using customer service as part of your business's marketing strategy can be.

We can surmise that using the “buyer persona” devised through customer service will help marketing teams create content that is more accessible to the campaign’s target customer.

Businesses learn about the customer’s interests, needs, issues, and other buyer persona elements through speaking to current customers. Customer services can assist in this area by surveying customers over the phone, email, or SMS.

Similarly, customer services can help encourage customers to leave positive reviews of their experience with your business. These reviews provide the marketing team with real-life customer stories and experiences to use on the company website or adapt to content ideas.

A communicative relationship between marketing and customer service helps truly identify what content your customers want to see on your website and from your business as a whole.

A Key Piece to Campaign Success

Utilizing customer service as a marketing strategy is an often ignored yet profitable resource, well established to bring you a more significant ROI.

Your business's customer service department communicates directly with your target audience. This integral team can assist your marketing department in identifying a strategy's success — and its downfalls.

Communication is key. Ensuring you have seamless communication channels between all your business departments is an essential factor of your campaign’s success.

Customer service can help you improve and adapt to current and future marketing strategies. It delves even deeper than analytics; real employees talking to real customers about what makes them want to invest.

You can’t get more personal than that.

Always included in MarketPlan is our top quality support from our team of marketing professionals. You’ll also get full community access, allowing you to gain expert insights into working with customer service as a marketing strategy.

Sign up today and get full access to what MarketPlan has to offer.