If you want to grow the customer base of your middle market company, consider tapping into the emerging technologies that are revolutionizing how customers adopt new products and services. When planning a new marketing campaign a generation ago, your first action might have been to request a meeting with a firm on 5th Avenue over a lunch of bourbon cocktails. Today, you get better results by sitting down with some of your youngest software developers or your data analysts who are buried in spreadsheets of customer data.
Getting new customers by word of mouth has the great advantage of costing nothing. Fortunately, technology can help accelerate this age-old process in a virtual age. Most companies have access to customer data relating to the purchases they have made. This invaluable information can be enhanced by tracking customers who visit your website and respond to your email campaigns. You can also leverage third-party databases of customer information. This data can be used to create profiles of the types of customers you serve, categorized by demographics, tastes, or affinities for other types of purchases. Once you have created profiles of likely customers, explore targeted marketing channels to reach those people. In addition, these big data sets can also increase sales among existing customers. Targeted upsell opportunities can be offered to those customers, either through discounts or special offers. This data also helps you create loyalty programs by better understanding what types of rewards and benefits they appreciate the most.
Social media is more than a fad - it's the fastest growing communications channel in history. For midsize businesses looking to take advantage of emerging technologies, using social channels is crucial to reach new consumers and extend awareness about a company. Keeping up with social media is simple. Assign someone who can post regular content (anything from a 140-character tweet up to a blog post) about the company to the public via Twitter, Facebook, or any other social networks that fit. Respond to what other people are saying about your company online, encourage the comments of your fans, and politely respond to any negative feedback. It provides an easy way for consumers to talk about your business. For example, a fan can take a photo of your product and post it on Instagram.
Omni-channel is a new buzzword among marketers. It describes the experience many consumers take to purchase products. They may first be exposed to the product across traditional print or television media, then they'll research it online or on their iPad, and finally walk into a brick-and-mortar store to pay. This sequence of behaviors makes the purchase process more complex, but it also offers opportunities. For businesses that understand their customers, there is a significant advantage relative to companies that continue to market purely through conventional channels.
New technologies are making the tests for marketing products easier than they have ever been. Instead of expensive focus groups, consider using email surveys, online video discussions, and crowd-sourced opinions from hundreds of prospective purchasers. When it comes time to build a product, new "agile" approaches allow for rapid iterations on product design. Products can often be produced in small batches and tested before larger production runs begin.
Another great change in this new technological world is the dropping of geographical and cultural barriers. Just think of Google as a marketing channel and this becomes obvious. You can build a website that will be indexed for searches from around the world. And if you can localize your website into multiple languages, it will travel even further. Twitter and Facebook are U.S. exports with tremendous reach within countries worldwide, while many markets such as China have homegrown Web channels that can reach millions of prospective customers. In much of the developing world, mobile phones have overtaken fixed-line infrastructure, and in those markets, working through new mobile social media can be one of the most effective ways to get a message out.
Today, it's no longer necessary to buy a Super Bowl ad or national billboard campaign to launch a new product or service. Technology can have a greater impact while being more cost effective. Just think of how Facebook grew a new market of hundreds of millions with virtually no marketing. There's no reason your company should not leverage the same trends to reach your next customer segment.
Matt Gross is an NCMM contributor and principal and founder of Mobile First Software, a focused consultancy that helps companies with mobile strategy, product design, product management, and application development.