By Liam Dowd - April 8th, 2014

Post sale relationships, benchmarking LinkedIn content performance and who really influences women?

Relationships don’t end after the sale

According to a new report from ACCENT Marketing, 86% of consumers surveyed stated it was important for them to have a positive experience with the company they had just purchases from. Indeed, half of consumers interact with a brand after their purchase has been completed.

“Despite widely accepted sentiment, driving customer engagement does not end once a customer makes a purchase,” states ACCENT. “Now more than ever, marketers need to seize the moment and put effort into creating a long, on-going relationship with each customer – recognizing that brands have the opportunity to create brand advocates through post-purchase engagement.

“ACCENT Marketing’s research also shows that while social media, video chat and other tools are available for communication, most customers still rely on proven channels like email, phone or in person interactions. In fact, 45% of consumers prefer to use email to communicate with a brand and 66% prefer to receive emails from brands, above phone calls or in person interactions. It’s interesting to note that across age groups, email was the preferred method for communication.”

What is clear from this research is email is still the preferred method of communication – at least for now. Looking at the responses that ACCENT collated however, reveals that 54% of consumers are more likely to make a future purchase when a company interacts with them on social media, with Millennials being the most active in this respect.

How Consumers Engage with Brands after Purchase

Benchmark your Content Performance

The Content Marketing Score is a recommendation engine that quantifies your impact by measuring your audience’s engagement with your content. It also reveals how you stack up against your competitors. You can even see a breakdown of how your content is performing across the LinkedIn platform including Company Updates, Sponsored Updates, Groups, Influencer Posts and more.

For corporations, the metrics that LinkedIn now offer give an unprecedented insight into not only how your business’ content is performing, but also how it compares to others in your sector. These statistics are powerful, and should be leveraged by all companies to better understand how their content is perceived and how these materials are influencing their profiles across this important social media network.

LinkedIn Content Marketing Score

Choose advocates and not influencers

At first glance you may be forgiven for thinking that brand influencers and brand advocates are one in the same. Research from Forrester and Nielsen however, reveals that this is far from the case. In the case of the former, influencers (defined as bloggers or pundits) accounted for only 18% of trusted influencers. Whereas 93% of consumers trust brand advocates (defined as satisfied customers), which is the same as a trusted friend of family member.

Clearly brand owners need to take care when defining their core group of influencers or advocates to understand their motivations. The differences can be subtle and overlapping, but it is important to make the distinction when using these groups as central components of marketing campaigns.

Nielsen-Trust-Ratings

Pester power

Identifying and then cultivating the core influencers within your business’ social media groups is vital to pursue. New research from Cherry London concludes that if your business is focused on women, you should also look closely at their children, as 7% of women cite their children as the most influential ranking higher than brand marketing activity and even their mums.

Tamara Gillan, CEO and founder of Cherry London, said: “It’s a challenging demographic for brands to deal with; 66% of adult women in the UK are mums and she is a key purchaser and decision maker for them right through from household shopping to cars. And brands don’t always get it right. Take the recent Bounty survey, which tell us 38% of mothers said that advertising portrays families and babies as too perfect, while 34% find it somewhat patronising.”

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.

Next Reads

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