Do your customers seek you out?

How much does customer loyalty bring your business to your stores, site or app versus how often you seek out the customer? If you’re achieving meaningful customer engagement and your loyalty programsare working, the balance will be in your favor.

Being Sought

We’ve worked hard to help people accidentally find us. Search engine optimization (SEO) is as old as the search engine itself. The moment there was a way to put a brand online, there had to be a way to be found and SEO was born. But unless your product is so undifferentiated that these schemes are your lifeblood, there has to be a better way.

Seth Godin talks about this in a recent post:

There are proven strategies that generic products can use so that they’re more likely to be stumbled upon by someone searching. Name your new book with all sorts of keywords in the title, for example, so it organically ranks higher for those very keywords…

The alternative is to create a product that earns a reputation sufficient that people choose to talk about it, choose to argue about it, choose to look for it. Not something like it, but it.

Nice to be found. Essential to be sought.

Godin didn’t say it in his classic brevity, but in the new age of customer engagement, the brand itself is also the product. The brand’s interaction with its customers is an essential part of the experience that surrounds the product and creates a compelling relationship, not just a transactional one.

As the technology of social, mobile and Big Data rewrite the rules of customer engagement, the first change needs be our mindset. We should seek to be sought by wrapping our customers in a compelling experience that brings them back time after time.

This post first appeared on the Loyalty Lab Blog and has been lightly edited.