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Marketing Doesn’t End With a Customer Purchase!

5 Post-Purchase Marketing Strategies to Create Loyal Customers

Your job as a marketer is not finished when a customer buys from your brand. In fact, some might argue your work is just starting. While acquiring a new customer is no longer five times more expensive than keeping existing customers, the importance of customer retention can’t be understated. Let’s take a look at five easy ways to create loyal, repeat customers with crafty digital marketing efforts!

Actively Post (And Encourage) Customer Reviews

How important are customer reviews?

More than one-third (38%) of customers agree they wouldn’t buy from a brand with less than 4-star aggregate reviews. But what is most important to customers? Believe it or not, it’s not functionality, quality, price, or availability. The most important part of the customer process is the overall customer experience.

That means brands with an overwhelmingly-positive, visible customer review presence will fare far better than their counterparts. People trust other people’s opinions when making decisions. When a close confidante isn’t available, we turn to online reviews.

It’s not enough to simply encourage and collect reviews. It’s imperative to both respond to them and optimize their visibility. That means responding to as many reviews as possible–both positive and negative. It also means it’s okay to post reviews on social media.

In fact, the latter is a great way to generate new leads. Show potential customers what existing customers are saying about your brand. Start conversations and encourage people to learn more, visit your site, and engage with your content.

Personalize As Much Communication as Possible

When it comes to communicating with your audience, you’re communicating with a complex, diverse group of people. That means a one-size-fits-all style of communication won’t cut it. Whenever possible, look to personalize every communication with your audience–from social media DMs to customer service chats to automated emails.

In fact, according to data from SalesForce, more than one-quarter of marketers saw an increase in revenue of over 20% from focused personalization efforts in 2020. Data from KO Marketing shows that over 70% of brands who ramped up their personalization marketing efforts over the past couple of years have seen a more than twofold increase in their ROI.

Personalization is not just knowing your customers’ names and where they live. It’s knowing their buying habits, their personality types, and so much more. The more you zoom in on each customer’s personal preferences, the more you’ll create a personalized experience.

Create an Experience to Create Loyal Customers

Digital marketing is a great way to augment sales efforts. At the same time, it shouldn’t be the sole focus of your marketing efforts. In other words, instead of creating sales content, create marketing content.

That means your marketing presence should create an immersive customer experience. Since you won’t be selling all the time, you can make good use of the rest of your content. For example, some content can entertain. Other content can engage and educate. As a whole, your content should move your customers through the sales cycle.

Create an experience and take customers behind the curtain. Show them the nuts and bolts of your operation, including the faces behind the brand. Create a wholesale customer experience with your content and they’ll keep coming back for more!

Build a Community

Here’s where social media is so valuable. You can leverage your pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc to build a passionate, loyal following of superfans!

Of course, it all starts with building a page and maintaining your content. But if you can encourage folks to follow, like, and engage, you’re building the foundations for long-term success.

The more you can get people involved with posting, responding, tagging, and otherwise engaging with your page, the more you’ll build up your community content. And when your customers see other customers happily engaging with your brand, they’ll know you’re doing something right. They’ll then want to experience it for themselves!

Appreciate (And Reinforce) Every Purchase

This one might be pretty simple, but it goes a long way. A sincere show of gratitude for every customer transaction can pay major dividends. You can also integrate your appreciation with a solicitation for feedback, comments, and advice.

“Thank you! We hope you enjoyed your experience! Please let us know how we can improve!”

Add it to a receipt, automate it in an email with every digital sale, or just post a variation on social media. Some brands even go as far as to weave their brand story into their show of thanks. For example, if a portion of proceeds go to a charity, let your customers know what their purchase is supporting.

If possible, show pictures and videos of the people directly impacted from your brand’s generosity. Some people are more than willing to spend an extra few bucks if they can see where the money is going.

Plus, it shows the human side of your brand. Supporting public causes can help people see what you stand for. That can help them better relate to your brand–building crucial loyalty.

Start Creating Loyal, Long-Term Customers Today!

The work of a marketing professional is never over. By using digital marketing content to create an immersive, personalized, appreciative, communicative brand experience, you can turn a one-time purchase into a lifetime of brand loyalty and create loyal customers!

February 1, 2025
Five Tips For Creating More Inclusive Content

As marketers, we want our content to reach as many people as possible. Of course, in order to reach diverse audiences, content has to be both engaging and inclusive. If part of your intended audience doesn’t relate to your content, they’re less likely to want to build a relationship with your brand. Here are five tips for creating more inclusive content.

Accessibility

Some folks–like the colorblind or visually impaired–can’t enjoy your content if they can’t physically engage with it. While building a branded color scheme–and including brilliant visuals–is a crucial part of digital marketing, it’s important to remember to make those visuals accessible to the visually impaired.

The best solution is to painstakingly include alt text in (almost) all your visual content. The basic rule of thumb is that if the image supplements the copy, include alt text. If the image is decorative, it doesn’t need alt text.

Avoid combinations like red/green, green/black, and green/purple. Those combinations can be difficult for people with colorblindness. In addition, avoid stereotypical color associations like blue for men and pink for women. Some colors may even have cultural connotations–so take that in mind while developing your branded color scheme!

Representation

Your customers want to be represented. Just like they want to see other people like them doing business with your brand, they want to see themselves represented in your content.

Think about your typical television commercial. The person or people represented are typically models or supermodels. Does that represent the average person? Probably not.

Instead, look to represent a diverse group of people–your intended audience. Don’t be afraid to show real people (who aren’t supermodels). Dove’s “Real Women” campaign shattered societal norms and changed the way we look at those who use our products and represent our brands.

Don’t alienate real people by suggesting that only the elite or attractive represent your brand. Dig in deep and represent folks from all backgrounds and walks of life. If possible, use real customers in your graphics–with permission, of course.

Avoid Generalizations & Biases

This one’s pretty simple. While we’re all guilty to some degree of harboring inherent biases, your branded content should be bias-free. As marketers, we need to be conscious of avoiding biases in every step of the content creation process.

Instead of designing for yourself, design for those you want to be represented. It can help to build detailed customer personas and profiles to better understand their complex needs. Once you know who your content is for, you’ll have a better idea of how to create it-and you’ll be able to create more inclusive content.

Use Common Language

The last thing you want to do is have someone skip your content because it’s too long or too complex. If you can keep it simple and use common, basic language, you’ll have a better shot of keeping more folks from start to finish.

Don’t use a five-dollar word when a nickel word will suffice. Unless your audience is exclusively highly educated, use the most simple words, bullet points, and even infographics and visuals to supplement your copy.

Tell Relatable Stories

Everyone loves a good story. In fact, people are 22 times more likely to remember a theme, statistic, or fact if it’s delivered via story. If you can tell stories with your marketing content, you’ll capture your audience’s attention more effectively than if you reproduced stats or self-promoted.

Think about each marketing message you want to deliver to your audience. How can you deliver that message while telling a story? More importantly, how can you make sure that story resonates with the folks you want to hear it?

Inclusivity = A Bigger Audience

If you can create more inclusive content, more people will relate to your brand. Look to represent your audience, keep things on common ground, and make sure everything you put online is accessible for everyone!

January 1, 2025
How to Create More Effective Social Media Campaigns

Building up a social media following and getting more engagement is one thing, but what about your campaigns? There’s no doubt your campaigns will differ in size, scope, and purpose. However, more effective social media campaigns have a few things in common. Let’s examine how to set up, refine, and manage a social media campaign to accomplish your goals.

Target A Specific Audience

Who benefits from your campaign? Your brand or your customers?

You want your customers to benefit from engaging and interacting with your brand–so they should be the focus. To that end, before you launch your campaign, you should have identified and fine-tuned your audience. Remember, you can’t reach everyone. Even if you could, it wouldn’t be effective.

Instead, focus on the customer persona(s) you want to reach. That could be a geographic area or a demographic swath. It could also be new/existing customers or any variation of folks you’ve reached or want to reach.

Most social media platforms make it easy to hone in on a select audience, which makes it even easier to target your campaign. Just make sure you set your parameters before you launch the campaign and watch as it reaches exactly who you want to reach.

Involve The Audience

It’s not enough to know your audience or to gear your campaign exclusively towards them. You have to get them inspired, engaged, and involved. So how do you do that? You have to get them to care.

Hashtags are a great way to involve your audience in raising awareness. Unfortunately, you need more than a few clever hashtags to get folks inspired to support your brand. Things like quizzes, games, and other interactive content are a great way to not only get people involved but to generate valuable feedback.

For instance, ask customers to weigh in on their favorite product, show off testimonials, and be transparent with your company culture. Instead of showing off your product or service, show off the people who make your brand what it is.

Long story short, more effective social media campaigns make the audience a part of the action rather than a passive onlooker.

Look At Your Competitors

One of the best ways to create a more effective social media campaign is to look at how your competitors have run their own campaigns. While you’re not going to steal their content or ideas, it can help to look at what’s worked–and what hasn’t.

With those insights, you can craft your own content series down to the finite details, orchestrating more engagement, interaction, and interest.

You may not be able to see how your competitors fared from their campaigns (in terms of sales data, etc.), but you can likely see interaction and engagement numbers. Use past data–both your own and your competitors–to fine-tune your approach and create more effective social media campaigns.

Take Advantage of New & Popular Technology

Part of separating yourself from the competition is differentiating your brand. In other words, why should people do business with you–especially if the difference between service or product offerings is negligible?

What better way to separate yourself from your competitors than by utilizing new, burgeoning technology? From live-streaming to TikTok and more, don’t be afraid to go where your customers are. The more spaces in which you advertise, the more opportunities you have to get eyes on that content.

Want to Create More Effective Social Media Campaigns?

Creating more effective social media campaigns comes down to doing the work. From researching your audience’s needs, wants, and interests to A/B testing copy, graphics, and delivery methods, there’s a lot that goes into it.

At J&E Media Corp, our battle-tested digital marketing experts can leverage our experience to craft more effective social media campaigns for your brand. Whether you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, get more folks interested, or convert more customers, we can tailor a campaign for you! Get in touch with us today to learn more!

June 22, 2022
How to Get More Followers (Without Paying)
The stronger your social media presence, the more highly potential customers will think of your brand. If you have a multitude of followers, not only will you be reaching a larger audience but you’ll get more engagement, drive more traffic, and even boost your SEO efforts. Here are a few crafty ways to get more followers–without paying an arm and a leg!

Choose The Right Channels

This one goes without saying. You’ll never grow your following if you’re chasing the wrong customers. While it’s okay to spread your presence over a few different platforms, make sure they’re the ones your customers are on. So how do you figure out where your customers are?
- Search relevant topics and keywords across social media to see where the traffic is.
- Look for relevant groups and discussions across different platforms.
- Where are your competitors advertising on social media?
Knowing where your audience spends their time is only half the battle.

Next, you have to learn how to best utilize the platform(s) of your choice. This is where you find out how each kind of content drives different actions, reactions, and engagement.

Optimize Your Content

Once you know where your audience spends their time, you have to figure out how to reach them. After all, the average person sees thousands of pieces of content daily. Keeping your content fresh and invigorating will help it break through all the “noise.”

To optimize your content, pick a few major themes/topics/areas of concern and focus your attention on them. Consider the different ways you can approach these major content pillars and plan a content series around building awareness, interest, consideration, or conversions.

Optimizing your social media profiles can be immensely impactful as well. From choosing the right photos to selecting easy-to-remember handles/usernames to including the right density of visible, user-friendly keywords, make your social media profile a cog in the SEO wheel.

The more visible your social media profiles are (both on the platforms themselves and search engines), the more people will find–and follow you.

Share & Collaborate

Sometimes, you just can’t do it alone. If you can collaborate with the right people–who also have a large, highly engaged following–you can add their followers. While it’s not necessarily easy to attract influencers–especially in an organic manner–getting people to promote and share your products, services, and content is a great way to get more followers.

In addition to collaborating with influencers, look to share and engage with relevant, topical content. Look to find other brands and pages with similar audiences and interests to share their posts and add to their conversations. If you do this frequently enough, your visibility will skyrocket, meaning you’ll grow your follower count.

Drive Traffic Across Platforms

Just like your website, your social media presence isn’t a standalone part of your marketing strategy. Each piece in the marketing mix should supplement and complement one another, meaning your website should link to social media–and vice versa.

Cross-promotion is another classic strategy to increase visibility and get more followers. Don’t be afraid to directly appeal to folks to follow all your pages. Stress the importance of each individual page and what folks should expect to gain from following that page.

Plus, by cross-promoting your content, you can make sure no one misses out on your best, most valuable content. For example, maybe you published an insightful blog post–and folks saw it on Facebook and your website. But because it was never promoted on Instagram, a segment of your audience missed out on it. Instead, take advantage of all your platforms, cross-promote, and don’t be afraid to recycle old or curated content.

Get More Followers Now!

There are numerous ways to grow your follower count–but many of them cost money–and their effectiveness is negligible. Stick to the basics and you’ll get more followers, drive more traffic, and engineer more conversions without stretching your budget!
June 17, 2022
How To Convert Customers Through Mobile Advertising

True or false: most ads perform better on mobile devices than desktop computers. The answer, of course, is false. While people may spend more leisure time on their mobile devices than on desktop computers, the average conversion rate for mobile advertising is lower than its desktop comparison. But if your ads aren’t being seen by folks on their mobile devices, you’re missing out on premium exposure!

Mobile Advertising vs. Desktop Advertising

First of all, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than converting a customer from a display ad. It doesn’t even matter if the customer sees the ad on a tablet, mobile device, or desktop computer; display ads, in general, are highly ineffective. But what about search ads? The overall conversion rate for search ads is roughly 4.2% overall, compared to 3.48% on mobile. While those data suggest mobile ads are less effective, the difference isn’t significant.

Again, most people spend more time on their cell phones than on desktop computers. But how often are those people “ready to buy” in general. Customers at brick-and-mortar stores are more often than not ready to buy. When was the last time you went to a physical store and didn’t bring your wallet? In comparison, mobile shoppers aren’t always ready to buy. While a customer might be browsing your online store, he or she might not even have his or her wallet nearby-or even be able to afford the product in question.

At the same time, you should be conscious of what’s known as alternate mobile conversions. You might not get the customer to buy right then and there, but if you can secure their intent to purchase, they’ll come back later. And while they might not come back and purchase on a mobile device, if they come back at all, you still generated the lead through mobile advertising. Most importantly, if you can capture their attention and stay in their mind, you’re more likely to eventually garner a conversion.

How to Make Mobile Ads Work

The most important step to optimizing your mobile advertising strategy is to optimize your digital content for mobile use. Poor mobile optimization will lead to a lower conversion rate from mobile users and eventually render your website obsolete to mobile users. Make sure your website’s content and graphics are mobile-friendly, and more importantly, make sure it’s as easy to buy online as it is in-store.

As mentioned, some visitors to your site-mobile or desktop-may have low purchase intent. Even a perfectly-optimized mobile site isn’t going to convince them to buy. However, if you make sure your ads are narrowly targeted, you can narrow your reach to a more specific subset of customers. To that end, you need to decide which KPIs are most important for your strategy. Are you looking for more conversions or more impressions?

Before you overhaul your mobile ads, take a look at how they’re performing. There are many reasons for low performance, but in most cases, you either have the wrong audience or the wrong content. If the right people aren’t seeing your ads-or if they don’t care-you’re wasting ad dollars. Remember, you’re literally competing for their attention.

Is Mobile Advertising The Future?

Even though mobile ads have a lower average conversion rate, mobile devices aren’t going out of style any time soon. In fact, technological advancements mean cell phones have more capabilities than ever. Because most phones can securely store their users’ financial information, it’s becoming easier than ever for customers to buy products with them. Combining the ease of mobile accessibility with the comfort of online shopping means its more likely than not that mobile shopping is the way of the future.

The better geared your digital marketing strategy is towards mobile users, the more potential customers you’ll be able to reach!

February 11, 2022