The goal for many brands is to become indispensable to their customers. It’s easy to see why – imagine the possibilities for long-term client engagement when your customers need to use your services and prefer what you have over the competition.
However, being indispensable is not an easy task. The world moves incredibly quickly, and if you rest on your laurels, it will be easy for your rivals to steal a march on your business and claim your once loyal customers for themselves. Business owners need to make sure they are positioning themselves as the best – and only – solution worthwhile for addressing customer’s needs.
Here are a few suggestions that can help your business stand out from the crowd, and become essential to your clients.
Understand your customer’s desires
Successful businesses know that their clients are kings. And creating a product or service that touches on the desires of those customers – while providing value – should be your number one goal. Ask yourself what your customer wants, and how they usually find what they need. What are their problems, and what, exactly, is getting in their way of solving them? Once you can answer all these questions and build up a picture of your client’s issues, you can start tapping into their desires.
Make their lives easier
If you can make your customer’s life easier, better, and simpler than it was before, you will find that they keep coming back for more, time and time again. Whether it’s helping them learn something, accomplish something, or just remove an unnecessary worry and pressure from their lives, making life easy is what all successful businesses must strive for.
Get them involved
Can you think of any ways to get your customers involved with your business? If you can incentivize them to do surveys, leave feedback, and provide valuable information, clients will often feel like they are investing a lot more in what you are doing. They might even become advocates or brand ambassadors for your business, rather than remaining as customers.
Always offer value
Pricing is a complicated process. On the one hand, you want to keep your prices low to entice people away from your rivals and provide a competitive service. But at the same time, you don’t want to appear cheap, or price yourself as the budget option – unless, of course, that’s your USP. Regardless, the key to becoming indispensable to your customers is offering them fantastic value. Consumers will happily pay more if the service is better, for example – think flying business class on a plane rather than flying coach. Once your customers perceive that the prices you charge offer the best value, it will be hard for them to switch to a rival product.
Become part of a customer’s daily life
Successful businesses know about the value of a returning customer, and the best way to make sure they keep coming back is to become a part of their daily lives. Take Tide, for example – the nation’s favorite laundry detergent – used in an enormous number of households on a daily basis.
Always innovate
The concept works for B2B companies, too – particularly in the technology sector. How many businesses use Google Docs every day, for example? Maybe you could hire an application developer to help you create a similar web-based app that your clients use all the time. Updates to current services will keep your products fresh, and ensure your company is always moving forward. The point is, by making your products and services innovative, usable and giving them a broad reach, you’ll find people start engaging with your business on a regular basis – and they will keep coming back.
Never ignore what a customer says
Your clients can tell you why they like your business a lot more than you can ever find out from analytics or data. So, always listen to what they have to say, and, more importantly, always take action and acknowledge their requests, ideas, and suggestions. Not only will it enhance your offering to the customer, but it also helps make the client feel special and involved. Once your customers feel like they have a stake in your business, you’ve won half the battle already, and they will be more likely to feel like your business is indispensable.
Always be awesome
Don’t just sell to your customers – give them other reasons to visit your website or pop into your store. Helpful, friendly staff who aren’t always pushing for a sale are a lot more attractive to customers than those that put people under pressure to buy. So, show off your expertise about your industry and products. Offer help whenever you can, and point people in the right direction if your business cannot assist them. Don’t forget, not every customer that comes into your store or visits your website is in the buying stage of the sales funnel. But if you help them out without trying to force a sale, when they do decide to buy, your company will be at the forefront of their minds.
Offer great content
One way of providing helpful advice is to create a space on your website for it. Engaging content that answers the questions your customers have is a great way of making your company indispensable. You will become an authority in your industry, and the go-to firm for people that have questions related to the products and services you sell. So, think about creating compelling, original content and using your blog to market it to the wider world. Not only will you establish yourself as an authority, but you’ll also attract a lot more loyal customers to your business.
Give something back
It costs far less to market to current and old customers than it does to find new ones. In fact, statistics suggest that the costs of unearthing new customers are around six times greater than keeping old ones happy. So, this gives you a lot more leeway when it comes to offering deals and discounts, as your cost per sale tumbles down. And given that most people like to get something back, it’s a great way of ensuring your clients never need to go anywhere else.
