Building Business Momentum through Continuous Customer Conversations

Author: Bert Kollaard

January 2009

A critical element of building and sustaining business momentum involves engaging your target audiences in a consistent manner by means of online and traditional marketing programs that establish and build your brand. Whether it involves your firms’ identity or the positioning of your products and/or services, successful brand building requires alignment of all aspects of the organization at every point of contact. These points of contact are referred to as touch points. Effective branding programs should be ongoing to properly address the entire continuum of the customer relationship lifecycle in order to have maximum impact. Ultimately, the result will be a community of loyal customers who serve as advocates for your organization, products and services.

Branding programs must clearly differentiate your organization from all other alternatives, regardless of existing parity. This differentiation must be implanted into the mind of current and prospective clients so that it establishes a solid, distinctive and realistic perception that your organization, product or service deserves their time and attention.

Placing the brand name on your website, business cards, vehicles and building is important … but not enough. Establishing and implementing an effective, integrated, disciplined and continuous branding program that links your differentiation to the mind of the client and prospect through a clear and effectively communicated value proposition is essential. And, because the motivations and expectations of customers can vary widely depending on what stage of the customer relationship lifecycle they are, branding programs and supporting messaging need to be closely aligned and incorporated into both traditional and online delivery vehicles.


Three Core Activities Are Essential
There are three core activities that are critical in fully leveraging the power of the brand in order to build and sustain business momentum. These include:

1.    Strategically defining and differentiating the brand
2.    Clearly communicating the brand message to attain the right market positioning
3.    Effectively delivering on the brand promise

Understanding the wants, needs, values, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, attitudes, etc. of your target audiences must be clearly understood during the continuous customer conversation process. Every interaction with various target audiences potentially impacts the brand and the perceptions of your organization, products and/or services. Therefore, consistently connecting the brand to the value proposition on a continuous basis, across all touch points and across the various stages of the customer relationship lifecycle is critical to building business momentum and brand equity.  

This is usually best accomplished by branding, positioning and messaging approaches that are aspirational in nature and resonate in the minds of target customers like a call to action or a rallying cry. This approach usually starts with the identification and formulation of a systematic series of strategic considerations about your organization, your services and your target audiences that allow you to zero in on the internal and external equity elements that make up your brand.

These equity elements are used to identify the essence of your brand and how your target audiences connect with it, which in turn allows you to develop and implement traditional and online tactical programs, supporting messaging and value proposition(s) to establish and build business momentum as well as value in your brand.

Aligning Deliverables with the CRM Lifecycle
In addition, close alignment of messaging and marketing deliverables with the various stages of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) lifecycle is central to brand building, messaging and communications program development and implementation.   

Integral to this approach is the recognition that customer relationships evolve over time and that different messaging, messaging vehicles (such as websites, e-mail, online advertising as well as traditional vehicles), marketing tools, and deliverables are needed to help customers advance through the various phases or stages of the lifecycle. Whether this involves selling and marketing products or services, or promoting public sector service organizations, the essence of the process and the customer relationship stages are largely the same.

Engaging in Continuous Customer Conversations to optimize the evolution of the customer relationship with your company, brand, product or service is at the heart of sustainable business momentum.

There is a critical need for carefully tailored messaging and a variety of effective, technology-driven marketing vehicles that are aligned with each phase or stage of the Customer Relationship Management process. For instance, as shown in the following illustration, communicating with a potential customer to raise their level of awareness and build preference will require different messaging and methods as contrasted with retaining an established customer and evolving them into a loyal user of, and advocate for, your business.