Market Your Business in 4 Easy Ways

Marketing your business is all about interaction.  You have to talk and communicate with people and your community and promote your business.  In today’s business world we are more influenced by comments from friends and anonymous reviews.  Today’s business economy is about listening, engaging, guiding and supporting your customers.  As a company it is imperative to develop a relationship with each of your customers.  These four simple steps will help you develop relationships with your customers.

1) Your Entire Organization Needs to Participate

Salespeople need to listen to their customers no matter where they interact, understand their needs and build deeper relationships. Product specialist will need to listen to product feedback. Customer service needs to proactively help and guide the customer. CEOs need to keep their finger on the pulse of the business. Everybody needs to listen and bring that knowledge back into the organization. Everybody needs to engage with the community.

For example, in 2009, 3,000 Best Buy employees volunteered to answer customer questions on Twitter (@twelpforce) as part of their daily work responsibilities. In three years, 50,000 questions were answered, employees engaged more deeply with their community and customers became evangelists for Best Buy.

2) Be Social Internally

You can’t present yourself as a social business to your customers if you are not a social business inside your company’s walls. You must enable the voice of the people to flow through your organization -- both the voice of customers and employees. Empower your team to make important decisions in favor of the customer at the moment of the interaction.

To do that, you need to break down the silos and boundaries that exist between departments. You need to give front-line employees the authority to be responsive to customers' frustrations. You need to create the same sense of community internally as you create externally with your customers. This means listening to every individual in the organization and helping them to collaborate more effectively, with the goal of continuously improving the customer experience.

3) Be Real

People like to connect with real people. They like to share their ideas, questions and frustrations with people who will listen and engage with them. They do not like canned responses, impersonal messages, or one-way communication.

People buy from people they like, and they can only like people they know. They cannot know you unless you step out from behind the curtain and reveal yourself.  Start by sharing things about yourself: your successes, your lessons learned, your observations, and your passions. When you open yourself up and really engage, your customers will begin to trust you, be responsive to you, and guide you to success.

4) Leverage Technology

Social businesses need to leverage the power of socially enabled software platforms. These tools unify customer communication and provide businesses with a 360-degree view of all your customer interactions. They provide deeper insight into who your customers are -- as individuals and en masse. As a business professional, you can tap this knowledge to find ways to connect and engage on a personal level.

Social CRM tools also help companies better collaborate and bubble up internal ideas that would have otherwise never seen the light. They help companies centralize their activities around their constituency's feedback, be it from customers, prospects, influencers, or partners.

Social CRM is the glue that will help your business become a true social business.