There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing – that’s the beauty of marketing! Every business demands a different approach. Let us dive deep into know what are the strategies to increase customer engagement for your business.
As earlier published in Communique magazine (Page 20)
You have done your work, have the ads running, have content ready, and the conversions are up and running. The work of content marketing doesn’t end here, though.
Gone are the days when one would rely just on creating content for new customers. With so many businesses practically having the same ideology, attracting customers, and shifting from the thinking-to-buying phase. So saturated as the domain becomes, it has become very easy to gain customers and convert them in the initial stage of the funnel.
But that’s not it; that’s definitely not how a business would plan to strive and boom in the present day and age. Studies have shown that a business profits much less from its new customers than from its older customers.
The work in such cases for an agency or brand is generating loyalty towards its band and creating a customer-first approach, which is possible through a dedicated customer engagement approach. Now, you might think, why would anyone employ someone to dedicate so strenuously to customer engagement.
Image Source: SEJ
As you know, customer engagement is simply an art and science of making your customer engaged, digitally speaking – hooked, to your content. How can you do that? Apart from being consistent in your effort, you can do that by always following an approach you ideate when making a funnel.
Like in the funnel, you dedicate resources to visualize your ideal customer avatar, the buyer person, reflect on their pain points, motivations, likes and dislikes. You’d have to adopt a similar way if you’re planning to target your already customers.
In today’s day and age, the brands must serve you, and the brands reflect you.
Brands & You
Gone are the days when you’d try to fit in the society and align yourself with the brand to prove to society that you’re a user of this brand. Now the games have changed. Leading brands have to adapt to their audience and customer market to stay relevant.
Image Source: VWO
As per eMarketer, about 80% of marketing professionals worldwide said they expect content-led campaigns to grow over the years.
Gone also are the days when brands reflected their point of view on how they’ll introduce the product, creating a demand for the product. Now, the brands have to create content that has to adhere to their target audience’s persona primarily. If it fails to track that, it becomes difficult for anyone to sustain that business for now.
It is important to note that customer engagement has evolved over the years. As marketers are getting skilled by balancing their way out through personalized and automated messages, inciting a response from your target audience to your targeted actions to generate engaged audiences can be slightly more tricky, if not difficult. In Scott Gould’s book, “The Shape of Engagement: The Art of Building Enduring Connections with Your Customers, Employees, and Communities,” he distills (and I quote); that customer engagement is more of a “journey to meaningful and rewarding relationships, experiences, connections, about understanding the steps and the strategy to effective long-term engagement.”
The motive here is to encourage the marketers to go beyond simply chasing clicks and urge consumers to interact with their brands.
As we’ve evolved over time, so have innovative and direct models of engagement. It is easy to understand what motivates people to engage with a brand, though it might not be as easy as it sounds like implementing it. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing – that’s the beauty of marketing. Every business demands a different approach. Let us dive deep into know what are the strategies to increase customer engagement for your business
1. Storytelling
Everyone loves to hear stories. We all are made up of stories. Whether you’re strict into a B2B business or B2C, people love to hear a value-driven story about your brand, brand values, and the mission of your brand. Without a well-crafted, customer-centric approach to delivering your story, the process of customer engagement becomes difficult. The customer needs to know what makes them relate to the ideologies of the organization.
With social media taking over real life, brands are going a step further to enhance their story-telling approach. A nice written and put-out story helps you gain an engaged audience and eventually humanises your brand, creating an emotional angle of your business. And we all know emotions affect humans.
Image Source: UX design
2. Tailor-Made Content
Gone are the days when you’d just put up exciting copies on billboards, magazines, or television. This is an era of customization. Make them feel special to make for the brand.
Tailor-made content and customization can be best through emails. Statistics have shown, businesses are spending more than ever on email marketing.
Another interesting finding is that due to social media, we’ve been gifted with influencer marketing. It has now become way easier to reach out to the “mass of the mass” through an influencer. Influencer marketing only aids in delivering tailor-made content, depending on their niche and market but also helps to build an authority for your brand among the massy people. If you have a product that is consumable for the mass, it is ideal you employ influencer marketing for your brand because not only will it give you the edge over other sorts of marketing, but it’ll only help your business to generate a loyal tribe. A few loyal, engaged customers and preferable to a hundred loose leads.
3. Platform Matters
Not all platforms are ideal for all businesses. One needs to understand where their customers are hanging out. Mainly, brands prefer Twitter and Instagram over Facebook when it comes to customer retention. This does not mean Facebook for brands is bad; rather, it is step one of the hundred levels of stairs you need to climb to reach your marketing goal to have an engaged audience.
Let us look at it this way; brands prefer to sort out any controversy over Twitter. Brands prefer to roll out new information through Instagram. Seldom does it interchange and this is because they know their audience in each platform is different. In order to truly connect with each of their audience, their
customer retention plan needs to be on point. Selecting a social media plan for your brand and business is important and was in the 2010s.
In the 2020s, it is all about how cleverly your brand can engage with its customer, which generates a brand value and positions your brand as the most preferred. That will give you an edge over your competitors.
Image Source: Social Media Week
4 – Digitize Data
This is the age of digitization. Everything, every information can be divided, broken into data. Let’s consider an interesting example – Suppose you run a peanut butter brand and look out to a particular segment of people to target your business specifically.
No longer can we group individuals just based on preference whether they prefer processed peanut butter organically. Customer’s preferences are further divided on whether that peanut butter is vegan or not. Whether peanut butter has the right ingredients in the right proportion, and so on.
Every customer is different. No longer can we club them into the segment where men prefer peanut butter more than women. You need to dissect them into information based on the data you generate. Data segmentation is a broad industry. Every piece of information we need to realize can be segmented.
Image Source: Ocrolus
Now, you might wonder how data can affect your customers? Data segmentation is a small spec and ideal for niche markets only. No, you couldn’t be more wrong. Let’s say you run a digital marketing training academy for young minds. You’ve rolled out a new product. It is doing well with new customers, but it has generated the demand you’d expected from your existing customers. You might wonder what went wrong? Whether that class simply did not want your product, or is there any other underlying reason?
Well, it might be possible that you’ve failed to understand their pain points. The pain points for the class which you’d overlooked to visualize the data of. It might be that that class already has different training modules similar to your new product, or it might be that the class doesn’t feel engaged enough in the process of you introducing that product.
You see, thus, it becomes only imperative that you digitize every piece of information to not miss out on any class or set or group of preference.
The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Customer Engagement
We need to realize that retaining a customer is a lot more difficult than acquiring one. You may run ads, put thought-provoking facts. Write value-driven posts, but if your story doesn’t connect with the audience, it is ultimately useless – it is useless marketing if you can’t retain your old customer. An engaged customer is a goldmine we’d rather be digging on in. You need to put their personal aspirations before us to make your business flourish.
There are so many businesses running right now, practically in the same business model, it wouldn’t be a matter of time to change their approach, but it will be difficult to adopt a strategy where they’d plan to set up a customer-centric approach. Their experiences, feedback, dos-donts, knowing what drives your customer.
You need to accurately know what ultimately guides them to prefer your brand over others. You need to pay attention to what works the best for you and what doesn’t. Acquire.io beautifully explained their take on how to achieve engaging customers and highlighted apart from sales. It is their customer management representative services that are ultimately the key to unlocking all the possible potentials. If you’ve tapped that, you have unearthed a milestone.
Image Source: PNG Item
Now, get back to work, and make sure your customers stay engaged with the brand as much as they can. Because now attention is money. Once you have their undivided attention, you have their money. 🙂
