After much debate, we came up with a model that in absence of anything snappier, we call the "Concentric Circles" model, showing the various stages a customer will go through as they move from being a distant potential customer to a deeply loyal brand advocate and repeat customer. In this context, it becomes clear that Social Media is effectively an extension of your CRM strategy, in fact even more broadly, part of your brand marketing strategy and a very important step in this process of winning customers' loyalty.

In its most basic form, the aim of any marketing strategy is to get people that aren’t customers to become customers, infrequent customers to become more regular customers and so on. The 'Concentric Circles' model breaks these into individual logical steps that directly reflect the channels, technologies and tools we have available today, and start to show how each step in this process can be optimised. 

So step-by-step, this model shows that we are all intially trying to get the distant  ‘brand aware’ (through advertising) to become ‘fans’ or ‘followers’ (through Social Media), and then to get our ‘fans’ and ‘followers’ to become ‘subscribers’ (i.e. to sign up to our email, text or direct marketing), for our ‘subscribers’ to become ‘customers’, and our customers to become ‘repeat customers’, slowly moving in to the centre of the circle.

It is worth noting that this movement inwards also lines up with their willingness to part with their personal contact details, and so a lot of the strategies to 'move people inwards' is as much about building likeability and trust, as it is about building a great product or service offering while offering great value.

It would be all too easy to view this as a dry and mechanical process, which of course it is not. Distant 'Brand Aware' people will only become fans or followers of your Facebook page if you offer them truly engaging reasons to do so, as similarly a customer will only come back to repeat their purchase if you can offer them a great customer experience in the first place.

However, breaking the process down into these smaller steps allows us to visualise the overall process, and begin to see that when we adopt effective strategies to get people moving in towards the circle, we can create very powerful business results. So the questions you should be asking are things like "how do we recruit more people to our fan page on Facebook?", "how do we improve the open and click through rates from a database email campaign?" or "how do we turn existing infrequent customers into regular customers?".

And the answers to these kinds of questions are essentially all about using the right technologies and the right strategies for each step. We are always interested to see how we can help our clients solve problems, so if you have these kind of questions, give us a call or drop us an email, and we’ll be only too happy to see how we can help.

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