ShipServ

Problem: ShipServ, an e-marketplace for the marine industry, connects more than
8,000 ships, 200 ship owners, managers, and yards with upwards of 45,000 marine
suppliers. In 2008, they realized their brand image was in trouble: their customers, who
weren’t very tech-savvy, deemed them too impersonal and opaque.

Solution: To help shake this perception, ShipServ dedicated the entirety of their small
marketing budget toward customer-focused content. They revamped their website,
launched a blog, published a series of whitepapers, created a LinkedIn group to build
community, and worked on search engine optimization.

Results:

 Website visitors increased by 59%

 LinkedIn and Twitter went from zero to the top 20 traffic sources
 Contact-to-lead (landing page contact) conversions increased by 150%
 Lead-to-opportunity conversions increased by 50%
 Campaign management costs decreased by 80%
 The number of sales-ready leads increased by 400%
 Measurable increase in brand awareness

Dedicating resources, budget, and manpower to content development is a great first

step for B2B companies entering the content marketing space. But it’s not enough. To
see true business value, the content must be rooted in the customer.

As competition has become more global and more intense, many companies have
found that they cannot succeed on their own. It is in these markets where several
businesses have developed a strategy to provide superior customer satisfaction in order
to distinguish their goods and services.

Benefits of a customer-focused organization

 Differentiate itself from the competition

  Improve its image in the eyes of the customers
 Minimize price sensitivity
 Improve profitability
 Increase customer satisfaction and retention
 Achieve a maximum number of advocates for the company
 Enhance its reputation
 Ensure products and services are delivered on time
 Improve staff morale
 Increase employee satisfaction and retention
 Increase productivity
 Continuous improvement to the operation of the company

The Loyalty Ladder

Most service organizations’ customer bases consists of those people who use products
or services on a more or less frequent basis. Some customers for example may only
have a relationship once with the company at one extreme; customers will use the
organization’s products or services on a regular basis.

Figure 1 The power of existing customers

Reasons for developing long-term relationships with customers

 The cost of acquiring new customers can be high

 Loyal customers tend to spend more
 Satisfied customers are likely to recommend your products and services
 Retaining existing customers prevents competitors from gaining market share

Figure 1.2 Loyalty ladder

Customer focus values enable an organization to calculate the net present value of the
profit, the business will realize on a customer over a period of time. It is an immensely
powerful tool because it allows companies to work out how many transaction will it take
to recoup the initial investment in attracting and servicing each new customer and
generate a worthwile return. When companies invest in programmes to strengthen
customer focus they can therefore do so knowing whether the resulting changes in
behavior will increase the profit derived from each customer.