Focus: Professional Services
Professional Services Organizations face some unique challenges in Marketing and Sales than product-oriented companies. While products are built, stored, sold and delivered with limited involvement of the customer, services are usually performed at customer sites with direct involvement of the customer. Product quality can be standardized for production. Services are unique each time they are delivered. The customer experience is very much linked to the skill set and performance of the service provider on-site.
What effect does this have on marketing and sales? What may have worked extremely well in managing a traditional product based organization will be ineffective in the world of services.
We have identified 4 Core Challenges & Solutions for Service Marketing:
- Customer acquisition
- Customer loyalty
- Service development
- Resources
Customer acquisition
Customer acquisition costs are increasing rapidly, caused by changing communication behavior, and most recently the economic down turn. Social networks, events, blogs, pay-per-click advertising have all created new avenues for businesses to promote their services, but they also have created the need to budget for them in terms of resources as well as real costs (i.e. PPC). Since customers are less predictable in their behavior, targeted demand generation initiatives has become more difficult using traditional means.
ViVOconcepts demand generation programs consist of multi-dimensional initiatives; each to reach out to specific audiences with specific behaviors. This includes email marketing, inbound landing pages, and search engine optimization techniques. Each solution focuses on customer acquisition.
Customer loyalty
At the same time, customer loyalty is eroding. On average a U.S.-based company loses half of its customers in five years. Service organizations experience even lower loyalty due to the lack of standardized service delivery parameters and traditional quality control methods.
ViVOconcepts has developed automated customer nurturing solutions that provides clients with a powerful suite of tools to boost customer loyalty. The web form builder allows companies to create surveys, questionnaires to learn more about each customer, their needs and interests, as well as monitoring service quality over time. Nurturing and scoring mechanisms render a real-time profile of marketing to management.
Service development
Forced by the changing expectations of customers and increased competition, most companies expect that 33% of their sales over the next 3 - 5 years will come from new products & services. Again, service professional have less time to innovate as service cycles are shorter than ever.
Since real-time knowledge about current market trends is critical to stay ahead of competition, ViVOconcepts empowers clients to collect and analyze data instantly. Customers’ digital footprint s are converted into powerful business intelligence reports that help companies to innovate faster with ViVOconcepts.
Resources
According to recent studies, 28% of organizations do not have designated services marketing teams s in place. This is a result of slashed budgets as well as an underdeveloped awareness of the power of dedicated service marketing initiatives.
ViVOconcepts has developed a new marketing automation concept. Our objective is to empower service organizations of all sizes to leverage innovative technologies for marketing and sales. Size does not matter! Even small teams can create customer-focused communication based on triggers and events.
Our new ViVO+ takes even this task off your plate. You can outsource marketing tasks to us, using our managed services expertise for demand generation, customer loyalty programs and more.