How you approach your customer is essential to brand empowerment. Your approach drives how and where you communicate with them, how they engage with you, if they purchase from you, and where they refer your brand within the community.
So, how do you empower your brand through your approach? Through onboarding and “inboarding.”
Onboarding your customers correctly through your brand will help them decide if you’re the right brand to engage with. “Inboarding” is the term I use to reference how you treat your customer once they’ve engaged with your brand. For example, how both parties (you and your customer) interact with each other once the customer has purchased from you.
Have compassion for your customers.
A lot of you may have already heard about features vs benefits messaging, so let me beat this dead horse for you further. 🙂
Here are two examples of messaging that would be displayed to a customer interested in purchasing app development services:
“We can develop awesome apps.”
Translation: This is what I do, do you need what I do?
OR…
“Our application development helps you look like champ: on budget, on target, and easy to use, every time.”
Translation: We can make your job easier by doing x, y, and z. How can we help accommodate your needs?
See how much of a difference this can make? It’s a subtle change, but it’s the difference between being selfish or compassionate toward your customers during the onboarding process.
When you talk about what your audience will gain by using your product/service, then it completely changes the tone of how you’re communicating. The benefits that you’re highlighting are the results of your audience’s desired outcomes.
In order to define your product’s benefits, you need to clarify the criteria they use to make the decision to buy from you. You need to take advantage of what responsibilities your product eases and how they measure the “success” of their job done well.
Knowing what your customers want will ultimately drive your marketing and sales messaging, and could possibly evolve your positioning and business model.
User Onboard posted a great article about Features vs Benefits, I would recommend reading it.
Know your value in the marketplace.
Fill out the following sentence:
We are really good at [your best strength]. Because of this, we help our customers [role or circumstance eased by your strength].
What are you really good at? How does this apply to your customer’s desired outcomes? Create an ultimate result that your customer can directly relate to your product’s strengths.
You are now applying a direct beneficial result that solves your customer’s pain point through your product. So, instead of telling them about your product directly, you now have compassion toward your customer and your customer is applying that understanding to a solution (your product).
Knowing how your strengths help solve your customer’s wants and needs is an important part of your brand value.
Deliver on your promises.
This is one of the keys to the success of any brand during customer inboarding.
If you’re messaging rocks but your product and customer services sucks, you have nothing of value to anyone. Make promises, then deliver them through a kick-butt product and killer service.
In fact, go above and beyond. Think about how you can add value before, during, and after the customer experience. Your customers will thank you.
In fact, they’ll likely be your best brand ambassadors.
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What do you think? How have you onboarded and inboarded? How do you think it has helped your brand?
I would love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave your thoughts, comments, and feedback in the comments below.
~ Christine