Why Marketing & Customer Service Must Work Together on Social Media

Nothing represents your brand on the internet better than your social media presence. If you have a dedicated marketing team in place, you already know that social media is one of most cost-effective platforms for lead generation, customer acquisition, user engagement and customer retention.

However, more often than not, the same platform becomes a place for customers to air their grievances, prompting your customer service team to jump in and solve them. This has led to several companies integrating the mutually exclusive departments of marketing and customer service and deploying this integration on social media. Does it work? Yes, here’s giving you a lowdown on the benefits of such a strategy:

1. An Integrated Experience:
Customers may interact with your company through either the social media channel or the customer service channel. Both these channels should have a voice consistent with the voice that defines your brand’s marketing efforts. Unifying customer service and marketing helps you provide a uniform customer experience so that your customers know they’re interacting with your brand regardless of the channel.

2. Instant Feedback:
Traditional methods of gaining feedback for your products and services are slow. Social media exponentially accelerates the process of gaining feedback. Keeping the tone of your brand consistent, your marketing team can ask for inputs regarding new product launches, issues and problems and what customers would like from the company in the future. The customer service team can use this data to plan and develop effective interaction strategies.

3. Understanding your Customers Better:
Integrating customer service and marketing helps you understand your customers better. The marketing team gains incredible insights into the wants and needs of the customers, helping them efficiently segment the target audience. The customer support team gains the information provided by customers through interactions on social media, helping them personalise their communication.

4. Enhanced Brand Loyalty;
When you understand your customers better and provide them with tailored experiences, you stand apart from your monotonous, lifeless competition. Your customers start wanting to buy your products or services, and they want their friends and family to buy them too. Unifying customer support and marketing leads to enhanced brand loyalty among customers and increased word-of-mouth publicity.

5. Building Lasting Relationships with Customers:
Marketing is about acquiring customers and getting them to stay. Customer support is about making them feel at home when they actually stay. Uniting both helps you get a better understanding of your audience so that you can customise the experiences you provide. This way, customers always feel cared for and listened to, further helping you build lasting relationships with them.

6. Consolidated Data Collection:
Data is after all the King! Companies use data gathered from social media channels to fuel R&D projects, make informed product decisions and design effective PR strategies. The marketing team can get into conversations with the customer base, recognise potential positive or negative trends, and then get in touch with the customer support team to understand how to respond. This way, both teams can provide complementary data to offer valuable insights into the customer base.

In order to achieve this level of integration, it is necessary to define which department will handle what and how. Marketing can take care of lead generation, damage control, proactive responses and brand awareness, while customer support can handle queries, grievances and complaints and tell the marketing team how to react. Doing so, you will improve the way your company communicates with your customers and build a loyal customer base.