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of your marketing efforts.)

      SMM at the loyalty stage

      The last stage of the marketing funnel has the fewest people. These are the customers who have purchased your product and are consuming it now. At this stage, it’s most important to encourage customers to spread the word about the product and encourage others to buy it. Loyal customers are often the best marketers for your company. With social media marketing, loyalty plays an even larger role.

      You must first focus on making your customers loyal and repeat customers. It’s no use encouraging a customer to talk about your product if she isn’t loyal to or an advocate of the product. You can incentivize your loyal customers to encourage their peers to test the product and make a purchase as well. You can do this using social media marketing tactics.

The best way to encourage loyal customers to influence their peers is to start by encouraging them to talk about the product. Having them rate and review the products is the first step. You’ll be surprised how many customers are happy to rate and review products. What’s more, as they rate and review the products, they’re also happy to broadcast the reviews to their social network. Allow them to do that. Provide the technological means for them to share their own reviews of the product with their friends and family.

      Another way that social media marketing can help at the loyalty stage is by connecting prospective customers with loyal customers. In some cases, you can link prospective customers with loyal customers who they know in the real world. For example, if you’re looking to buy a Ford Taurus, and you have a network of 350 people in LinkedIn, you may find that someone else in your network drives a Ford Taurus. Now, wouldn’t it be valuable if Ford told you which friend drives the Ford Taurus so that you could ask that friend her opinion? That’s increasingly possible to do in the social networks.

      Regardless of whether you have any friends who own Fords, you might be interested in learning about Ford from other Ford customers. Social media marketing is about connecting customers to one another so that they can socially influence each other to make better decisions. In this instance, Ford should definitely try to connect all the prospective Ford Taurus owners with the current ones. One simple way to do this is to set up a Facebook page or a LinkedIn group for Ford Taurus owners in specific locations and then point prospective customers to that page, where they can ask existing owners questions. It can only help them make more purchases. Not surprisingly, Ford does exactly that, and in fact, it now goes a step further by offering Ford customers the opportunity to put a “badge” on their Facebook profiles showcasing the fact that they are Ford customers!

      The loyalty stage of the marketing funnel is important because that’s where the most remarketing happens by your own customers. Just because the customer has already bought the product doesn’t mean you should care about her less. In fact, with her ability to spread the word (positively or negatively) about your product across her social network and the social web in an exponential fashion, you had better take good care of her. Otherwise, you may have a PR disaster on your hands.

      Probably one of the most classic examples of a PR disaster at the loyalty stage has to do with Netflix. Without consulting its customers, Netflix made an attempt to divide its business into two, with one focusing on DVD rentals and the other online streaming. The pricing of each also increased with this announcement. Upon hearing the news, customers fled en masse, including those who had previously been among the most loyal. Management had to completely reverse the decision to split the company, and only now has gained back its lost customers.

On the bright side, when JetBlue suffered probably its most major PR disaster in its history, the chief executive officer decided to issue an apology via YouTube — using the very same social platform that was responsible for the propagation of the PR crisis. The runway fiasco, as it came to be known, was when passengers were kept in planes on the runway for hours on end during a winter storm. Using the social platforms to apologize made a difference, and it helped even more when the CEO announced a passenger bill of rights. These actions showed that he was engaging with his current and prospective customers on their own terms and on their social platforms of choice (he engaged with the angry customers on Twitter, too).

There are hundreds of examples of brands facing online firestorms, often due to something stupid that a company did. Table 3-1 highlights some of the more notable firestorms. Also listed are whether these online difficulties had offline ripples in the mainstream media.

TABLE 3-1 Notable Online Firestorms

Controversy	Online Noise Levels	Offline
Nivea’s racially insensitive ad	High	High
American Airlines removes Alec Baldwin from plane for not turning off his phone when requested	High	High
Gilbert Gottfried’s firing by AFLAC for insensitive remarks about the Japan earthquake	High	Moderate
Dunkin’ Donuts/Rachael Ray wears keffiyeh	High	Moderate
Burger King employee bathes in sink	Moderate	Low
Motrin moms	High	Low
#amazonfail	High	None
SpongeBob SquareButt	Moderate	Low

Deepening Your SMM Relationship

      After your customers are at the loyalty stage, can you do anything more to deepen the relationship? SMM gives you the opportunity to stay in contact with your customers and help them in ways they don’t anticipate. Delight is a strong element in growing your bond. Following are some areas of SMM that help you extend that trust.

      SMM for customer service

After customers found that they could quickly get a company’s attention on social media platforms, the notion of customer service changed forever. Previously, the only option consumers had was to get on the phone and wait patiently until they could speak to a representative. Often, the outcome was less than satisfactory.

      Presently, consumers make it a point to seek out companies that offer them a voice on social platforms. The SmartInsights study from 2017 found that:

       Sixty-three percent of customers expect companies to offer customer service via their social media channels.

       Ninety percent of social media users have already used social media as a way to communicate with a brand or a business.

       Customers prefer social media 34.5 percent of the time for customer service compared to 24.7 percent for live chat, 19.4 percent for email, and 16.1 percent for toll-free phone service.

      

If you are dissatisfied with a purchase or service, you can use social media to tweet, post, or otherwise rate your way onto the radar screen of the company in question.

      Here

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