What do customers want from businesses in 2022

We are being bombarded with ever-increasing amounts of information in the current business climate. To gain a competitive advantage and remain relevant in today's market, companies must understand their customers' wants. In 2022, customers want businesses to be transparent and accountable for their actions. They want businesses to be responsive and provide a consistent level of service. Customers want companies to be adaptive and make changes based on feedback. Customers also want businesses to be ethical and sustainable. They want businesses to be easy to reach, efficient, and responsive to their needs. Customers also want companies to be transparent and honest, and they want businesses to offer a variety of services and products.

But what they want the most is for businesses to provide them with a great experience. In this post, I explain how companies can build a great customer experience, and I focus on what's most important to your customers and how you can deliver that consistently.

We're not just talking about businesses looking for a quick fix, we're talking about companies looking for a long-term relationship with their customers.

With great experience, you're not only going to learn what customers want, but you will also be able to build a customer experience that is truly unique and memorable.

What Is A Community?

This is a popular topic among the community, but it is also one that many businesses don't talk about much. After all, what company wants to talk about that? The thing about it is that as we grow and scale, we want to make sure our customers are happy. We want them to see us as a valuable business with good products and services, and we want them to connect with each other through our platforms. This means we need to build a deep relationship with our customers.

To build this kind of relationship, I often recommend doing customer research — in the form of surveys or web polls — to get a clear picture of what customers really want from you. In addition, you should do more customer development (a process I will cover in a later post) because it's not enough just to make sure your user base is big enough; you also have to make certain people are using your product well.

In this post, I'll talk about how businesses can encourage their customers to connect (either through social media or other channels). But first…

Why Create Value?

For the last few years, there have been many discussions around "customer acquisition" and "conversion rates".

There are many metrics out there, depending on your perspective. Some are more objective — like the number of customers you have, the number of leads you have, etc. Some are more subjective — such as whether a customer is happy with your product or not…

What I consider most important is that we should be thinking about conversion rates — conversion rates are the number of customers who have come to your website or app and actually made something of value from it.

Conversion rates can be measured in two ways: how many people actually use a product or service and how many people convert into paying customers (i.e., people who pay for something in return for additional benefits). If you can convert millions of people into paying customers, you have more money in your pocket than any other person on earth; but if one tiny number is all you need to measure conversion rate success, then it isn't worth spreading your cash around.

The reason this matters is that having a large user base will make it easier to sell more things to them; they will be less likely to abandon your product, and they will be less likely to turn someone away because they don't like what they see — which means you should focus more on converting new users rather than existing ones.

Simply put, if you want to make money off your products, you need lots of users, hence why so many companies try getting their products into as many hands as possible (and get so much attention for it). I realise now that trying hard enough to get a large user base often doesn't pay off at all (or at least not in the way that we want). And what I also realise now is that doing anything else at all usually does not pay off either (or for much longer than we wish). So if you are going to spend time and money trying to get users… do so in a way that leads directly from value propositions or stories that can drive revenue back up again.

Creating Value in A Digital Community

This is an interesting question. It reminds me of the difference between a company's value proposition and its marketing message and why it is important to understand both.

The first part of this subtopic is about creating value for customers, and the second part is about creating value for investors. We will explore both with a few interesting examples.

We're starting with the first part: finding ways to generate new value for customers. In fact, that's what we do at The Thrivology Company, which we believe is the core of our success. Our customers give us feedback on what they want from us; we then offer them something better than what they would have gotten from their own alternatives (i.e., an experience that puts them in charge of their own destiny). In fact, we are doing so much more than this — but let's start there.

A customer who receives a better experience from The Thrivology Company than a competitor will be happy to pay more for it (and not just pocket some money as a "lost opportunity"). The first step in making this happen is understanding what makes your customers tick — their expectations, fears and goals. And you should do this by understanding what makes them tick in general, rather than focusing on one specific feature or line of products that might be useful to them (or, even worse, focusing on why they don't want something before they do). Once you understand their desires and fears, you can start thinking about how you can help satisfy these things rather than simply meeting other people's needs or preferences (aka: "quid pro quo" model). You might need to reassure or motivate them by adding another dimension of fun and enjoyment into the existing features of your product — which again might be different from one service provider offering similar functionality as another (e.g., giving more options for delivering content automatically to your users instead of delivery via email attachments etc.). As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

In short: Think about how people use your product differently compared with other similar products — if you want to make money from them, you should provide something that has never been done before! This isn't always easy because people are used to having specific experiences with similar products — or even just having certain expectations when using those products

Building your community around your product.

We've been so busy getting this post published that we haven't had time to read it. So, here are some thoughts that have come to mind while reading through it. The first is the idea of building a community around your product rather than an audience. Steve Blank's book "Lean In" has a chapter on this subject, and the best part is that it doesn't focus on marketing but on creating a really vibrant community around your product. Here are some of the benefits:

1. Community members will be interested in what you do (even if they aren't customers).

2. Community members will be good advocates for you and your product (even if you aren't a customer).

3. Community members will help build your brand (even if you aren't paying them or don't have any relationships with other customers).

I think both of these points are important to understand if you will build a community around your product. You're not necessarily looking at people who use your product or people who pay for it; sometimes, people need more before they become interested in your product, even more than what they paid for it. And we can only hope that our individual communities will benefit from such benefits, one way or another (and indeed, we can hope for such benefits from the broader world).

Sure, there are many other things that customers want from businesses in 2022. But what really matters is the intersection between the two. How can we combine this with a business model that works for customers in 2022? What does it mean to be a customer-centric company today?

It's easy to see all these trends as either inevitable or inevitable, but it isn't. Even if all the trends are inevitable (and I'm not convinced that they are), what does it mean for consumers to be future-oriented consumers? What does it mean to be more than just another product or service? If you say you are customer-centric and your strategy is performing, who exactly do you serve? How do you find out what they want beyond their current needs and desires, and how do you build something they will value into their lives?

The Value of Community

You can't get ahead of the crowd. But it is possible to leave them behind. So the community is a strong pillar of any business model, and it's why businesses succeed.

But it's also a job that takes a lot of time, energy and effort, and only if you can manage it well can you keep your business growing and thriving.

If you want to grow your business, or if you want to make money in the long run, then it is important to understand how the community works. The Benefits of Community Relationships are one of the most powerful ways to get people to be inspired by your brand, to want to do business with you, and buy from you. The benefits of a community can be summed up in one word: trust. When you build a relationship with people, you give them something they really want, and you get something in return.

For example, if you are a small business owner and you are selling to your local community, you give them the benefit of your expertise in a particular area, and they get the benefit of connecting with people that can help them solve problems.

When you build community, you can start a conversation and create a bond that will compel people to act on it. If you already have a business relationship with a particular group, then you can use that relationship as an opportunity to inspire people in ways they might not have thought possible.

The Importance of Community Building

What do you think the future of business will be? What is the value you place on community and on building a community that grows over time?

In my opinion, this is the most important question for any business to ask. It's not only about growth but also about quality and longevity. If a community doesn't grow organically (i.e. without corporate or external interference), it won't grow. And if it doesn't grow organically, it won't have any real value for long.

Community building can be divided into "organic" and "inorganic." The first refers to building up a community organically; the second refers to taking an existing community and making it artificial in nature through social engineering or through large-scale marketing efforts (Facebook, Google+, Instagram, etc.).

A business is not an entity with one purpose: it needs to be able to cater to customers who want different things from themselves. And so we start off by making sure our product gives customers what they want — whether that is true Value or not — before we really think about building up a community around us.

Today, I would like to talk about what I believe to be some of the best practices in building up communities. There are many other things you can learn from these examples that are worth taking note of; please let me know if there are any particular topics you find valuable while reading this post! (in the comments below).

One thing I did want to stress here is that these practices are mainly applicable when you are starting out (via bootstrapping), while they will become outdated once your business starts getting substantial traction with larger numbers of customers/users/advertisers/passive users and so on (which must happen before your focus shifts completely). So please take this post as more an introduction than anything else and a reminder that cultivating communities should always be a priority for any organisation that wants long-term stability and growth.

The most important point I want to make here is that community is one of the most important factors for successful growth and conversion rates. Building communities has the potential to be one of the most significant growth strategies you can use to grow your business.

Creating a Community-Oriented Culture

Our world is so packed with information that most people drown in an ocean of distractions. As a result, many people find it difficult to stay focused on their personal lives.

If this sounds like a familiar problem, you know what I'm talking about. The same frustration drives us to spend more money than we should on impulse purchases or bad deals from our friends' Facebook feeds.

Surprisingly, one of the ways you can balance your life and make it more productive is to create a community-oriented culture for your business.

Exacerbated by the increasingly competitive nature of today's business landscape and the rise of social media, this is a big problem that businesses need to address. A community-oriented culture helps businesses connect with customers and better serve them by providing them with valuable information and feedback and providing extra incentives for customers to refer others to their business (a referral program). Social media has become so easy that companies don't have to bother with traditional methods like mailing catalogues or making phone calls anymore.

Today's busy employees need tools that facilitate collaboration and social interaction online—whether they're at work, at home or on vacation—and put all kinds of people in touch with each other through blogs, podcasts and social media sites like Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn. The results? More satisfied customers bring other people into their business network through referrals while simultaneously lowering customer service costs—and those profits are bound to follow!

Improving Customer Engagement with Social Media

The average business owner knows that social media has the potential to increase customer engagement and loyalty. But, many businesses overlook social media as a channel for customer interaction. You can learn how to use social media effectively to improve retention rates and increase brand visibility.

Social media marketing is about turning a traditional medium into an effective communication tool for your business. It is all about making your existing customers feel like part of your business and a relationship with them. If you're like most businesses, the idea of a social media campaign is no more scary than a big corporate marketing push. It's just another channel to reach your audience, and it's something that should be well-understood by everyone in your organisation.

But what you may often overlook is that social media isn't just another channel, and it has the potential to be your most powerful marketing tool. And each of our customers is a unique individual with different interests and needs.

You must understand the needs of your audience and cater to their unique desires with appropriate content. You can do this by using social media features – features that enable you to engage with people on those channels, providing them with relevant content, relevant products or services, or both. Basically, use social media to build your community.

Does Social Media even HAVE a Promising Future?

Social media can be a powerful way to engage your customers. However, the hard truth is that only a small percentage of your customer base will ever interact with social media, and social media engagement plateaued a few years ago.

Social media trends have gone in an entirely different direction since then.

Social Media Marketing is not dead, but it has changed quite dramatically. Social media is more than just a digital marketing strategy. Social media is now part of the fabric of our daily lives and has become a key component in how we interact with others. While social media has been around for years, creating and sharing content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube have become more mainstream in recent years. Social media marketing is the ongoing use of social media to promote your business or interest. Social media marketing can build brand awareness, increase brand loyalty, increase sales, and drive traffic to your website. Social media is a great way to reach your customers, but it can be difficult for businesses and brands to keep up with their competitors.

But its Social Media Engagement is Limited

Many of us have been writing about the "Engagement Curve" for the last few years. The curve describes the relationship between engagement and retention, which is commonly used to understand marketing's effectiveness. It's a very simple idea and gives some pretty decent insight into how engagement and retention are related, but it also obscures other important things.

This is particularly true in social media, where most people only interact with social media once a day (so they aren't really engaged). And it's not just that: most social media engagement is actually around sharing of content (no one posts or retweets unless they have something interesting to say), so what you need to do isn't just post content with an eye on engagement, but also building a community around your product/service.

Engagement means more than just talking about your product or service. For example, if we were talking about Instagram as an engagement medium, we should be thinking about finding new ways for our users to share their photos and stories with others (rather than just posting our own photos). We should consider building tools that enable our users to share their photos and stories in ways others might not know (such as through 360-degree videos).

This points out one reason why social media engagement can last for such a long time: you need different things from different people at different times — so what you need to do is find ways of providing those things in different ways so that even if they don't become engaged now, they will later. You need to make sure that when someone does engage, they enjoy it (and so will come back again)…

In fact, it seems like we are in a "golden age" of social media. But if you think back to the early days, remember when it was all about Facebook? That means that while things have changed, they haven't changed very much. Social media is still about sharing experiences. In fact, if you're reading this post, you are probably a person who is using social media to do that. Some of the great things about social media have allowed us to connect with people who share similar interests and activities. If you are in a business that uses social media, then the question is simple: How can you use it to connect with the people you want to connect with? Well, it's all about the content that allows you to connect with people around shared interests.

What about the Offline Experience

Over time, many people have come to realise that the most effective way to engage your customers is through offline experience. It's not just a matter of being relevant or having the right kind of content but capturing people's attention in their own homes and creating an emotional connection with them. This is very much related to the value proposition: it's about creating more value than meets the eye.

The first step is to understand what makes users connect with you and your brand online as well as offline:

• Does your product have something else that it does well? — then, you would understand how users will be attracted and why they will be attracted to your product over others in your space

• Does your product have something known or familiar? — then people will be drawn towards it because it makes them happy or comfortable (even if they don't realise it)

• Do you already have a great reputation? — then people are likely to trust you because they know others trust you (although this often isn't enough)

The advantages of focusing on these three factors are clear now that social media has become popular. Social media provides an avenue for connecting with customers directly; it allows users to interact with businesses; and most importantly, social media has proven itself an effective tool for acquiring new customers. However, two important features of social media are often overlooked:

1) It doesn't take long for brands who don't fully understand how their consumers use social media; and

2) Social media just isn't very scalable but can be quite effective at solving problems which aren't easy to solve offline, like making connections between different groups of people who may not otherwise be able to interact directly or find each other by searching on Google or Facebook.

This means that even if you manage to get a significant share of consumers using social media, non-communication channels like radio or TV may still be more effective at reaching many more potential customers than social media ever could reach even one per cent of potential customers.

There were two major conclusions we came to after our research. The first was that social media is not the solution for all companies and is not going away anytime soon. The second was that social media marketing is not a silver bullet. It's a completely different animal from traditional marketing, and it has its own set of challenges.

We can start by asking the question: what do customers really want? In other words: what makes people buy?

The answer comes from data or at least part of the answer. According to a 2012 study by King's College (London) and MIT Sloan School of Management (Cambridge), "frequent online shoppers spent $17 billion more than non-shoppers every year between 2003 and 2008." This was true across all channels, including offline shopping (eBay, Amazon), shopping on mobile devices (Apple app store), shopping on desktop browsers (Google Chrome browser) etc.

However, the study does not reveal the drivers of this spending, and it doesn't even work out what makes people shop more often online than offline, and it only provides a very general framework for understanding how online shopping works.

Why Social Media Marketing Is an Important Tool for Businesses

Social media marketing is a powerful tool that can significantly increase conversion rates. While you cannot directly measure how many people are 'engaged' with your brand on social media platforms, you can gauge the effectiveness of your campaign by measuring the level of engagement.

Engagement is defined as a customer interacting with your brand on social media or via other marketing channels. In other words, it is the amount of time that customers spend with your brand and its products. For most businesses, this will be an average number of hours spent per day on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. For example, if an average business user spends 1 hour per day on Facebook and has 10 Facebook friends who spend 1 hour per day on Facebook every day, it will be obvious that these businesses have very high levels of engagement.

Engagement is also important for businesses because it is one indicator of customer satisfaction. The more engaged a customer is with your brand or product through social media channels, the more likely they will purchase from you or recommend it to others (this may even lead to higher conversions).

There are countless reasons businesses should work closely with their social media management teams. By working together, they can create a platform that allows them to interact with customers in a more meaningful way.

What social media management is not: Social media management is not about creating hype. As Jason Shellenberger, Director of Digital Strategy for L'Oréal USA, said, "Social media is about providing information about your business to customers when they need it. Social media management is not about mass messaging, and it is not about making sure your business is mentioned in every single article that appears online. Social media management is not about promoting your brand 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Social media management is about giving your customers the information they need in the format they want when they need it. Social media management is about managing your brand and growing your business through social media.

How to Improve Customer Engagement on Social Media

This is a tough topic to write about because it is extremely important.

There are two key things to understand here: first, it is not enough to just put social media on the same list of channels that help you market your product; second, you should focus on different channels.

First, we need to understand that there isn't one single channel for customer engagement. If we want to optimise customer engagement, we need to optimise multiple channels.

The reason is: that the best way of improving customer engagement depends on what type of customer you have and how that customer interacts with your business.

For example: if your customers are buyers (they come in for a specific reason and leave with a specific product or service), you will want them to engage with your company through PRIVATE messages (like Twitter). If your customers are sellers (they come in for a specific reason and leave with a product they bought elsewhere), then PRIVATE MESSAGING is not appropriate. The best way of improving customer engagement is by using SOCIAL MEDIA like FACEBOOK or TWITTER and PRIVATE MESSAGING like EMAIL or CRM systems.

How do you know if social media is right for your business? Social media is absolutely right if you have a specific audience that consists of the same type of people each time. The best example of this is when you go to a restaurant with friends. You always go to the same place and order the same thing. If you are a restaurant owner, you should definitely be using social media like FACEBOOK or TWITTER and PRIVATE MESSAGING like EMAIL or CRM systems.

Social media can be used to promote a product and drive sales. Indeed, the marketing of products and services can be driven by social media. However, there are many pitfalls when it comes to using social media effectively, like channelling everyone toward a particular post or taking excessive advantage of the attention given by friends on Facebook. For example, if you post your new product on Facebook, do you want your customers to see it? Or do you want them to see what their friends are seeing?

Businesses must make sure they use social media correctly. If they do this correctly, they will reach out and engage with their customers on an ongoing basis, maximising customer engagement and loyalty. Many tools available today allow businesses to create great content for their customers, and they can also use these tools to create a community within the Social Media community and get many followers for their brand without spending a lot of money.

Hosts such as Facebook and Twitter provide brands with valuable tools for creating amazing content; however, we must understand how these tools work to maximise our return on investment (ROI). For example, there's no point in targeting people who have just joined your page or haven't given any feedback yet (which most brands do). Instead, you need to target people who have given feedback before (if you're launching a new product) or have engaged in other ways with your company (if you want them to buy).

Building Trust Online

What if you could create a shell game, and instead of playing the same game repeatedly, you could change it up just a bit every time? This is exactly what Social Media Marketing (also called Social Media Advertising) offers. It's an opportunity to break down the boundaries of traditional marketing and start building relationships with customers on an entirely new level.

I'll show you how to do this through Social Media Marketing by building a relationship with your customers on social media. By doing so, you will be able to build trust in your brand and make them feel as though they are part of a community. You will also be able to keep up with the latest trends in marketing by doing this.

This is the beginning of a journey that will lead you towards creating a brand that people will take seriously for generations to come. This process isn't something that we will wait on, and we're going to do it ourselves!

So, what do you do if you want to build a relationship with your customers? You're not just building brand awareness—you're building trust.

Trust is the foundation of any relationship. Without it, your customers will wonder, "Why are you doing this?" and question what they should believe in.

Trust is especially important for online businesses because that's where people spend most of their time. They don't have time to research or ask questions about everything, and more often than not, their questions are not answered.

You have to build trust before selling them anything (that's why it's called trust). It takes a little bit of effort, but it's worth it in the long run because trust is a key factor in conversion rates and sales and customer retention.

However, building trust takes more effort than just offering something good or useful; it takes concerted effort to create a relationship with your customers, which will last for the long term and be beneficial for both parties involved—yourself as an entrepreneur and your customers as future clients. You have to think about why your audience is interested in what you offer, who they are and what motivates them to buy from you (i.e., why are they responding?).

Trust is a tricky concept. People will tell you it is hard to earn and that no one can tell you how to do it. But the trouble with trust is that nobody has even tried to figure out why when something goes wrong. When something goes wrong, all of us react in very different ways: we blame the company, we blame ourselves, we throw up our hands and say, "What did I do?" and move on.

There are two main reasons why people don't go to the trouble of learning how to build trust online: 1) they don't have time; 2) they aren't sure how they could use the information that's there

So here are two things you can do now: 1) Start understanding what your customers are doing to build trust; 2) start making systems so that your customers can learn about other people's experiences as a way of building trust—that move from "what can I do for my customer" (which needs no explanation) into "what can I do for this person?"

How Your Business Can Build an Online Community from Social Media Marketing

Building strong relationships with your customers is a great way to increase engagement and customer loyalty. But the key to this is not just to have the right messages but also to have the right way of getting those messages out.

You need to be able to find that magic ratio between content and delivery. The ratio between content and delivery can be broken down into two main components:

1) Content vs Delivery – this has more impact on every piece of content you produce, whether on your website or in an email. If you are delivering it in a different way than what people are used to accessing, then users will get the wrong message (it can be as simple as using multiple images for one link or not using a link at all). In fact, poor user experience has been known to cause over 40% of smartphone site visits (of which only 15% convert sales).

2) Delivery vs Content – this is more of a question of style and awareness. How well do you know your audience? Can you match their expectations and deliver on them? This is the key to success when it comes to content marketing. Think about it. If you can't deliver your content, why would anyone want to read it? The more quality content you produce, the better your chances of success.

If you look around Twitter these days, there is an overall trend toward consistency across channels — so consistency in both delivery and content means that users will get what they are looking for without too much effort.

As a first step, you need to understand your customer. What do they want? What do they value? How do you deliver it? How do you measure that Value? What is the difference between true and false value propositions?

Don't get caught up in the hype like many businesses; constantly doing low-value tasks like creating new logo designs. Some of these businesses have a new one every few weeks or months. Instead, think about the "Value" your perfect customer will get from your product and service will ultimately be your driver to success.

These questions will help you create more effective communication with your customers, and they will also help you understand them — both in terms of what they want out of your product and what they expect from it.

Conclusion

We discussed how to pinpoint what customers really want. By understanding your customer's needs, you will be able to design a business that will resonate with them and keep them engaged.

Today, the majority of digital businesses are focused on acquiring customers. They want to convince you that they're the best or that they can solve your problem, or that they can do it at a lower cost than you can. They often use sales copy and marketing copy designed to elicit customers' emotions and make them feel comfortable about making a purchase. This is a dismal short-term approach to business success, far from driving business growth.

Instead, we need to get serious about building a community of happy and satisfied customers with our products. As our customers become immersed in our community (whether by becoming members or simply interacting with other members), that community will grow over time and ultimately achieve the same benefits as traditional acquisition channels (sell-through rate, customer satisfaction rate and so on).

To build this community effectively, we need to be clear about what it is we want from your customer base: what they want from us (to help them make decisions around how to spend their money) and what they don't want (to help them make decisions around how much money they should put towards us). We should be gathering feedback from those customers in real-time, capturing their thoughts and feelings as they interact with us. We should also be able to do all this without using any marketing/sales copy or sales funnel because we have discovered ways of continuously observing our users across all channels.

In summary, it is about understanding what the problems are for each of your potential customers to provide an ideal solution for each of them. Once your business can solve someone's problem, it instantly corrects Value. And that Value can be then turned into a community of Thriving fans.

This post was put together using the outline from our upcoming digital boss programme; here's a link to the programme below: https://www.thethrivologycompany.com/digitalboss

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