Customer Satisfaction’s Role in Marketing

Customer satisfaction plays a HUGE role in the success (or failure) of your marketing campaign.  Creating a successful marketing strategy begins and ends with knowing your target audience.

If your target audience is leaving messages like the one to the left – well no viral marketing messages can overcome a lack of customer service.

Make no mistake – you won’t find marketing success without a large measure of customer satisfaction.

In the days prior to the world wide web and the ensuing social media explosion – the holy grail of marketing was word of mouth advertising. In a nutshell, word of mouth marketing depends upon customer satisfaction to generate “buzz” in the community. One satisfied customer  tells another and suddenly, a business would find it’s sales growing without spending precious dollars on traditional advertising.

In a vicious “catch 22″ the very businesses who could benefit the MOST from a traditionally orchestrated marketing campaign were the ones least likely to do so.  These hard working small businesses could count on their supremely satisfied customers to spread the word.

The reason I say that this is a vicious “catch 22″ is that a business that delights it’s customers is the one most likely to see results from a properly executed marketing campaign.

A well executed marketing campaign will literally destroy a business that isn’t already skilled in the art and science of customer satisfaction.

Count on it.  The best advertising campaign will bring new customers to your business… and then it’s up to you and your staff to live up to the promises you made in that advertising campaign.

I’ve written before about unrealistic marketing expectations….

I am working with a client who has done EVERYTHING right. She tightly targeted her marketing efforts to focus on a specific target or niche audience. Not only was her marketing tightly targeted, she even tightly targeted her product offering. Even though she began this process long before she had read my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.

Even though she hadn’t read my book, she had followed the steps outlined in the book beautifully. Her product was not only tightly targeted to a specific market, it also addressed an issue which literally CONSUMED her target audience.

So, it wasn’t surprising that after launching a new web site marketing strategy with a redesigned web site, new business blog and an email newsletter, that she began enjoying phenomenal success. After 6 short months the results were literally amazing.  Her newsletter had a 76% sign up rate.  That meant that out of 100 visitors to her site, 76 were signing up for her newsletter. (For the rest of us, an average sign up rate for an online newsletter is about 13 %.)

In a nutshell, my client’s sales were climbing and customer service was effortless because customers were delighted with her product.  Yet, my client was upset.  Turns out, she had been making the “info guru free teleclass” rounds and as a result, her expectations for her marketing were really out of line.

Sometimes – it’s hard in our current culture – where most marketing messages seem to be a study in hyperbole – to see how making the sale on the back of establishing unrealistic expectations is like blowing your nose with a tissue filled with sneezing powder.

Sure, you’ll make a few short term sales – but when you make unrealistic promises which can’t be fulfilled – you end up with a slew of customers who are not satisfied.

No matter how successful your marketing efforts are – they will never be able to overcome an inherent lack of customer satisfaction.  Seek first not to understand – but rather to delight your customers.  Once your customers are delighted – then the rest is relatively easy.

If you need a step by step guide to creating truly effective marketing messages for your small business- pick up a copy of my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.