Great brands make every effort to control and provide amazing experiences for their customers. (Need some help here? Check out our recent post on How to Make Your Next Customer’s Experience the Best Yet.) Yet as careful and strategically savvy as they can be, many companies drop the ball when it comes to the digital customer experience.
Your brand needs to extend consistently across all digital touch points — that is the obvious end-goal, but it can be harder to execute than one might think.
Know your voice.
The bulk of digital marketing these days begins with content creation. Content for your website, content for your blog, your emails, your white papers, videos, webinars, podcasts… The more content you create, the more individuals (and in some cases, agencies) become involved. If you have not targeted and articulated a clear vision of your brand’s voice, your messages will sound fragmented — at a minimum, confusing to your customer — at worst, schizophrenic. There is nothing wrong with having multiple authors and viewpoints, but they must share a common thread and purpose.
Be careful who you put in the driver’s seat.
It’s the social media story we’ve heard a million times before, and yet it keeps happening. Large, prestigious company allows inexperienced person (like an intern) to man their social media account; said person commits major faux pas on Twitter (or Facebook, etc.); brand suffers terribly from ensuing PR fiasco.
To avoid this fate, never forget that your social media accounts are a large part of your company’s public persona. This is an important job and should be treated as such. Sure, mistakes could happen with anyone. However, the odds of a serious screw-up decrease dramatically when the person is more seasoned and intimately familiar with your brand and its customers.
Don’t be “that guy.”
There’s always the one. The annoying guy… the one that pesters you to no end. Somehow, even the most conscientious companies lose sight of proper etiquette in their drive to obtain and progress digital leads. Would you call a customer nearly every day to follow up? Hopefully not. Then don’t litter their inbox with hundreds of emails. Would you set up a meeting and then have nothing of value to say? No — you would not dream of wasting your customer’s time like that. So make sure your messages also provide value. Would you require someone to fill out a hand written form with twenty questions? No? Then don't make them fill out lengthy registration forms online either. Keep your questions to a minimum and give them the option of saving their info for future interactions.
Hopefully these tips will help you navigate the world of digital customer relations and translate your brand’s promise online. Although it may feel like another world out there, it’s just an extension of "real life.”
