In today’s digitalized world, customers expect brands to foresee their needs and meet them in real-time. They want to know they’re heard, that their problems will be fixed, that they’ll get answers to their questions. In other words, they want to feel a connection to your brand.
In fact, it is safe to say that customers have become somewhat spoiled, which makes things quite difficult for business owners and marketers. Now, besides marketing and outstanding customer service, brands also need to focus on customer engagement.
Here are 6 ideas to help you pull off a solid customer engagement strategy to enhance brand growth and loyalty.
- Make Your Brand Human
As mentioned before, customers want to feel that you understand their needs and that they can relate to your brand.
Try to find an individual in your company who’s good at communication and who’s passionate about your brand. Give this person a voice to make your brand more human and engage your audience.
Create opportunities for this individual to build an online presence and promote your business, whether by regularly posting blogs on your website or guest blogging on others, start a podcast, publish ebooks and white papers, present webinars, etc. All this will help put a familiar, friendly face to your brand.
- Make Customer Experience Your Top Priority
Studies have shown that about 80% of consumers in the States are ready to pay more for a product to ensure an excellent customer experience. Customer experience is very important because it gives business owners and marketers an opportunity to boost customers’ loyalty, satisfaction, and, in turn, boost advocacy.
So, if you want your business to be successful, you always need to put customers first. Start by making sure that your customer support team has everything they need in order to provide outstanding customer experience.
- Use Social Media
Engaging people on social media isn’t an easy task. You need to hold their attention by consistently posting fresh content, while at the same time being relevant and timely.
But rather than just trying to post on a regular basis, you need to find a way to keep your audience captivated. The best way to achieve this is by leveraging trending topics. This will allow you to include yourself in massive discussions that are already happening, which is much easier than starting a discussion from scratch.
In addition, instead of trying to build a following with original content, consider sharing content created by others. Find out what your customers are interested in and check out your competitors to see what is popular.
Make sure that your account is visually attractive, This will help you stand out from the crowd and ensure that people take notice. Optimize your visuals, and post videos, images, and text alternately.
Finally, pay attention to timing. Try posting at different times and track your engagement. Once you start to notice patterns, use them to adjust your posting times.
- Create an Online Community
Creating an online community will help you build a community of motivated, passionate, and vocal customers. A community is a great way to strengthen relationships and stronger relationships mean that customers will be more loyal to your brand.
But when companies create a private online community, the number one question is “how to boost engagement?” How do you create a place where customers return and contribute to conversations, where they get answers to their questions, share ideas, and help others? A place where they feel a meaningful connection with your brand and with other customers?
Start by making sure that you use your online community to educate your customers instead of marketing to them. It also helps if you find ways to reward and celebrate your customers because this will make them feel valued. Finally, try to connect with your audience on an emotional level (videos are a great way to do this).
- Create Great Content
Content for customer engagement is about being relevant. It means providing value by focusing on the likes, wants, emotions, and behavior of your target audience. In other words, if you want to increase engagement, the content you create needs to be “customer-centric”. It needs to be useful and provide some sort of value.
Engaging content will come naturally if you take some time to really get to know the people you are trying to connect with. Your objective should be to engage over time, not just drive numbers up with sporadic campaigns. It’s all about consistency, listening, and understanding.
- Personalize Your Communications
Personalization can take various forms, from auto-generated birthday emails to product recommendations based on browsing history.
Marketers that have used personalization in their campaigns have reported more than 80% increase in open rates, at least 75% click-through rates, as well as a decrease in unsubscribes by up to 40%.
The explanation for this is simple: by tailoring your communication to your customers’ profile information, likes and dislikes, as well as their overall behavior, they view the content as relevant and, as a result, they’re less likely to unsubscribe.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, whatever experience strategies you decide to go with, consistency is key. Think about your customers, their overall experience from their very first contact with your brand, as well as the brand messaging you employ. Make sure to provide a consistently outstanding experience and they will reward you with their loyalty and trust.
