We often think of social media as a marketing tool. This has an obvious reason: Social networks are fertile ground for a brand to connect with its audience, hear opinions, promote creative content, start conversations and generate a sense of community with its customers.
In other words, social media campaigns are excellent additives to any brand’s marketing strategy.
By now, we already know this is just one of the benefits social channels can bring to a brand. We saw social media can directly help the sales team and promote a shopping experience, as much as its KPIs can be passed on to other departments in the company.
These channels are important touchpoints for talking to your customers.
Businesses are beginning to see social media also as a customer service channel, and the motivation behind that is simple: people are looking for these channels to talk to companies. Whether to seek information, buy, or solve problems, they expect a response as fast, complete, and helpful as any other official brand’s communication channel.
Integrating social media strategies with customer success to drive growth is essential. In today’s digital-first world, not only does this boost engagement, but retention as well.
Customer success marketing must bring together the benefits of social media as a marketing tool and its ability to satisfy the continued demand for exceptional customer service.g problems fast and accessibility of product information are key to keeping customers happy and building trust.
What Is Customer Success Marketing?
Customer experience is most important for the success of a digital marketing campaign. So, what exactly is customer success marketing?
Customer success marketing ensures that the buyer achieves maximum value throughout the customer journey and measures customer outcomes based on those touchpoints.
Customer success vs. customer service are two very different objectives, but in customer success marketing, the aim is ultimately to provide outstanding support and service to achieve the end goal: landing the customer’s business.
Consider a quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “We’re not competitor obsessed; we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs, and we work backwards.“
The Customer Wants Issues Solved Easily and Quickly
Classic situation: you have a problem with your internet and you dial your service provider. Then, you input your account information and wait for the attendant to talk to you.
Sometimes, you have to wait on hold for many minutes or hours. Then someone answers you. You explain your problem. This person asks you to go through several basic troubleshooting steps that you already tried. Then, they transfer you.
You wait some more. You talk to another attendant. You have to explain again what your problem is. And then this person can’t always help you and needs to transfer you to another support tier or supervisor. And so on.
With the power of the internet, people know their problems can damage the reputation of a company if shared on social channels by lots of people.
Of course, as a company, you want to give the best service to your customers. But in social channels, if some issue goes viral, even people that never contacted you might avoid making deals with you or stop working with you because of other customers’ problems.
That’s why making the relationship between marketing and customer success closer is so important in the social media era. Marketing knows how to monitor social services, and customer success knows how to solve clients’ problems. It’s important to give a solution to your customers on any channel where they contact you.
This alignment can help create closer relationships with your customers and helps avoid having an image crisis due to a lack of monitoring social mentions.
Of course, the number of social messages received varies between companies. A B2C online retailer, for example, is going to receive a lot more requests and will have to build faster and more robust processes to get solutions to customers.
But even B2B companies like Rock Content, with most of their requests coming from more traditional sources, have to monitor their social media accounts and build processes to integrate better marketing and customer success.
And of course, this is a challenge. Here at Rock Content, our marketing and customer success teams are attempting to build a more holistic understanding of customers and promote successful partnerships on a broader scale.
Here are a few tips based on what we’ve learned so far.
Key Strategies for Integrating Social Media and Customer Success
Customer success marketing is the primary goal of any company in a digital-first economy. A successful marketing strategy is customer-centric when it delivers a clear benefit to the consumer. These strategies make that possible.
1. Proactive Customer Engagement
Engage customers proactively on social media platforms. Do not wait for them to come to you. Instead, it’s critical to use social media platforms as a launching point for conversations. Address their queries and questions.
Provide real-time support for issues the customer is having. For example, learn what features are used most by your loyal customers and replicate that experience for other users.
Consider using social media posts and polls to help inform decision-making. Build a loyalty program to promote through your social media pages. Make customer service part of product delivery.
2. Build a Community
A HubSpot study found that 86 percent of social media marketers believe building an active community is critical to a brand’s social media success in 2024, and 60 percent say they are already engaged in the process of building that community.
Social media is an important and easy way to build a community around your brand. It enables you to provide brand-centric messaging, foster a supportive environment for customer success, and stay in tune with what your customers want and need.
3. Leveraging User-Generated Content (UGC)
UGC is one of the best resources for building your customer success strategy. Look around social media, and you’ll likely see numerous brands that use content like photos, videos, and statements created by users of their products to promote those same products to other customers.
For example, Crocs, the well-known footwear brand, launched a Jibbitz-based social media campaign encouraging people to showcase their custom-designed shoes using Jibbitz gems.
Another example is Sephora, a nationally recognized makeup retailer. The company’s Community Gallery allows real customers to post photos of their products in use.
4. Personalized Customer Support
When you define customer success, it is impossible not to consider providing exceptional one-on-one support. One way to accomplish that is to embed personalized customer support directly into your social media engagement.
By linking marketing and customer success, “the collaboration minimizes the chances of missteps and maximizes the potential for a flawless customer journey,” notes Foleon. “The customer success team leverages the insights and research the marketing team provides to deliver a seamless, personalized experience.“
5. Feedback and Continuous Improvement
When you learn how customer success and marketing work together, you gain the opportunity to better understand the needs of your buyers. For example, one way to achieve this is to use customer feedback loops.
A robust loop strategy that involves both marketing and customer success teams will ensure both teams gather and analyze feedback.
As noted by Foleon, “Regularly share insights from customer feedback to improve products, services, and marketing campaigns. This joint effort enhances the customer experience and aligns both teams in addressing customer needs.“
Best Practices for Combining Social Media and Customer Success
To leverage customer success, consider the following best practices:
- Utilize social listening tactics to help your organization find out what people are saying about your brand. Active listening enables you to get a jumpstart on learning what people say, good or bad, before anyone else hears it.
- Measure the impact of your customer success initiatives by using tools that are designed to capture essential data, such as a CSM calculator.
- Always create consistent messaging across all channels. It should communicate the same brand image, the same messaging insights and terminology, and the same overall commitment to customer success.
- Respond promptly. There may not be a specific timeline that is perfect, but the sooner you respond to your customer’s queries or the negative feedback on your social media page, the more opportunity you’ll have to reach people where they are when they need it most.
- Build personalized interaction opportunities by utilizing quality content, engaging social media pieces, and incentive-based opportunities to connect.
Final Thoughts
Integrating social media and customer success into your company’s next campaign helps you deliver what your customers need and want before the sale, so they come back after the sale. Creating a quality content experience is paramount to that process.
Learn more about Rock Content’s ability to deliver exceptional content experiences that build on your customer success marketing efforts.
