Turning Your Online Clients Into Loyal Advocates

The rules have changed. Your clients are no longer willing to accept anything less than what they want when it comes to doing business with you and your company. They want what they want and they want it now.

The age of instant gratification is now upon us. Social media has given us a tremendous volume of information at our fingertips. There is absolutely no waiting when it comes to people getting the answers that they are seeking. The intelligent businesses have an understanding of the idea that social media will dramatically improve their business’s success and they are making tremendous efforts to leverage social media in the most innovative and effective ways possible.

Customers are not generally interested in communicating negative feedback about businesses and their brands unless they have a really sound reason for doing so. From the business owner’s perspective, it is a really intelligent thing to treat your clients in the best possible way. Obviously, you don’t want them to be one-time clients but rather you want them to be loyal clients to your business and you that means that you want them to return to you over and over again for many years to come. Additionally, you want them to believe in your brand and in what you are doing so much that they will want to sing your praises and the praises of your business to other people whom they know and trust.

There are several ways in which to turn your online clients into loyal advocates for your business.

Act quickly

When you hear from one of your online clients regarding an issue that requires support from you, the client expects and extremely quick response. Quick means really quick (10 minutes) or pretty quick (within an hour maximum). If you don’t address the support issue quickly, you will be doing the reputation of your business damage that you may not be able to undo. On the other hand, if you act quickly, you will be building loyalty among your clients and the only type of feedback that you will receive from them will be positive feedback. You never want to give them a reason to say anything negative.

Always be consistent

It is critical that your clients know that they can count on you and your business to be consistent and to always be there for them no matter what they need or want. If you give them one answer one time and another answer another time, they will be confused. On your mission to proving your trustworthiness and credibility, the consistency will be a huge contributing factor. They need to be able to rely on the fact that you will give them the same answer (or at least the same approach) every time they interact with you.

Let them see you

Transparency and visibility are extremely important elements in your relationships with your clients. When it comes to doing business online, the transparency factor is more important than ever. Your clients need to know that they can trust you and they will never trust you if they think that you are hiding something from them. Each time that you post content, you are interacting with them and building your relationship and making it stronger and deeper. Be a part of the discussion but don’t monopolize the discussion. It is important that you are regarded as an important person in that context but that you are also regarded as one of many important parts of it.

Make sure that everything is in order

Because of the nature of doing business online and the number of social media channels with which you will be involved for your business, it is critical to your success that you are as organized as possible. If you are not organized and your social media interactions are chaotic, people will be able to sense that and will not react favorably. If you are not sure about how to get organized, you should do some research online and find out how other people have done it successfully. There is nothing wrong with mimic other people when it comes to organizational skills as long as what they are doing makes sense for your business.

Interact on a human level

The success of social media lies with the human factor. Social media is successful because people share relationships and relationships can only flourish because of the fact that the emotional connection is sustained. People always react to what touches them emotionally. If they can’t relate, they won’t react. It is as simple as that. The more you interact with people, the more they will get to know you and the more they will like you. Hopefully, that will eventually end with their liking you so much that they will want to buy what you are selling.

Conclusion

Your social media interactions for business are evolving on a regular basis. The relationships that you share with others are constantly evolving. It is very important that you have strategically positioned your business to cultivate those advocates. If your clients have wonderfully positive experiences, they will absolutely want to tell others about it. No relationship stays the same over time. It either deepens or it disappears. You will be able to tell which ones are working and which ones are not working and you will decide upon those relationships one at a time as to whether you should continue to pursue them or let them go.

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