The marketing department and sales department work together to close deals and acquire customers. If they are not doing that, then they are letting a lot of money slip away. But so many companies out there will have these two departments in conflict with each other. This doesn’t need to be the case. They both can work together to create customer engagement, which can lead to longer customer relationships and revenue for your company.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is a process of interacting with your customers to drive more sales. This does not just include marketing, it also involves sales and customer service. While this may seem like an obvious definition of what customer engagement is, understanding that all three departments need to work together so that you can truly reach your goals will help set you up for success in the long term. To create a cohesive strategy, it’s important to understand where each department comes into play when building your overall plan.
How to create customer engagement
Customer engagement is a journey, not a destination. It’s not about having all the right content in the right place at the right time. It’s also about creating value for your customers and helping them along their customer journeys. Customer engagement is about more than just sales and marketing alignment – it’s also about creating customer value on multiple levels, including the following:
- Product/service benefits (what your product can do for them)
- User experience (how they interact with your brand)
- Brand image (how they perceive your brand)
Common misconceptions about customer engagement
You may be thinking that customer engagement means sales, marketing, and social media. Or maybe you’re considering loyalty programs. While these things can be part of a comprehensive customer engagement strategy, they are not the whole story.
Think about it: if your organization’s only focus was on selling more stuff to your customers, there wouldn’t be much of a distinction between sales and marketing. And if all you did was talk about how great your company is on Facebook and Twitter (and there were no other interactions between your brand and consumers), then you’d just be another loudmouth who doesn’t know when enough is enough.
Customer engagement isn’t about any one thing—it’s about everything you do together to create experiences that connect people with your brands in meaningful ways that benefit both parties over time.
Effective customer engagement relies on sales and marketing alignment
To create an effective customer engagement strategy, you need sales and marketing to be aligned on a customer-focused approach. This means that your sales and marketing teams should be agreeing on how they will deliver a seamless experience across all channels.
For example, if you have a call center team that is not properly trained on CRM data or expects to get calls from customers without being prompted by marketing emails or ads, they’re going to lose opportunities for upsells and cross-sells because these elements were never communicated during the call. Likewise, if your B2B website doesn’t allow leads to easily sign up for newsletters and free resources such as white papers and eBooks (which are critical for building trust), then those leads will likely go elsewhere where they can find what they need quickly and easily.
This also applies in reverse: The more integrated your team members are with each other’s roles (for instance through regular meetings that bring everyone together), the better-equipped everyone will be at creating content tailored specifically for their target audience’s needs—and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences across all channels.
Conclusion
Customer engagement is a key component of effective marketing. It can help you build relationships with your customers, understand them better and ultimately drive more sales. But it’s not just about developing engaging content anymore. Today’s consumers are immersed in social media networks, so businesses need to be there too—and that means sales and marketing must work together to create an effective brand presence across all channels.