The reality in many industries today is that to acquire, convert, retain and turn customers into advocates, you need to engage them. To do that, companies need to invest time and effort in connecting with their prospects in an appropriate, effective, and meaningful way. That is the only way customers can choose your products or services over the competition’s, tell their family and friends about them, and keep coming back for more.
Yet, building good and lasting relationships with your customers can be a tough challenge. There are many tactics you can use to boost customer engagement. The important thing is to choose the most appropriate one for your business and learn how to use them strategically. And for that, you need to build a customer engagement strategy.
Here is how you can do that!
1. Offer great customer support.
Excellent customer support goes beyond keeping your customers satisfied. It also helps you understand them, define your organization, and most importantly, impact your bottom line. These days, customers have a more active role than ever in their purchase decisions. Throughout their purchasing process, they can connect with your customer service staff or other customers at critical touchpoints.
That being said, invest in empowering your customers with customer support tools to encourage them to interact more significantly with your brand. That is a brilliant aspect of your customer engagement strategy because consumers’ word of mouth generates far more than the sales of paid advertising. By making services accessible to your customers, you will increase the likelihood of having a good experience and becoming brand advocates.
2. Take advantage of growth marketing.
Digital marketing is becoming more sophisticated and indispensable in operating your business. To secure building customer relationships and foster loyalty, take advantage of growth marketing. It is a long-term strategy where authenticity and engagement create advocacy and organically grow customer lifetime values.
This means that you should consider using social media to engage with existing customers and reach new ones. A few ways you could do this is by opting to get Instagram followers to fortify your brands’ social presence, grow conversions, drive profitable traffic to landing pages, and genuinely build an engaged audience. Keep in mind that as your audience keeps on growing, the more opportunities you’d get to engage with customers and create unique experiences for them.
3. Make your brand relatable.
Successful customer engagement is not only about providing a smooth and efficient customer experience. For example, before they engage with a brand, they need to be aware that this brand exists and has something relevant, unique, or valuable to offer. So, creating a brand personality that customers will love getting to know and want to engage with is an essential part of every customer engagement strategy.
Create a sense of meaning and connection with customers to attract their attention and promote opportunities for engagement. Make sure you communicate a sense of authenticity in just about every way you do business. It might mean sourcing materials with an organic and ethical origin for your company, or it can be the personal story of how your company was born. Whatever this authenticity means for your brand, look for ways to make it visible to your customers.
4. Do not compromise on content.
Content can help you achieve many goals, but customer engagement is always the central one. Creating content for customer engagement is about presenting the relevance of your brand and responding to your customer’s needs. It means providing your audience with value and, most importantly, focusing on your customer’s wants, emotions, likes, and behavior.
All the content you put out on your webpage, and your social media channels must have the “customer-centric” value — the usefulness. Never lose sight of the fact that relevance drives consumption and is the essential attribute your marketing team must deliver in order to be successful in their content marketing efforts.
5. Collect customer feedback.
One of the essential aspects of a solid customer engagement strategy is customer feedback. Getting a review of your brand’s products or services directly from your audience (about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction) has an enormous value in increasing customer engagement and improving your offer. In addition, acknowledging what your customers perceive about your business will help you:
- Create effective marketing strategies based on your customers’ needs;
- Open the door for better client engagement;
- Build loyalty for the company and;
- Help you work on the loopholes and thus improve your business performance.
The Bottom Line.
Customer engagement is all online and offline practices of interaction with your customers. Ideally, those interactions should prompt them to feel and respond positively towards your business or brand. By focusing on value creation, these companies give people something meaningful beyond a sales offering: an excellent customer experience, great content, and interactive, real-time customer support. A solid customer engagement strategy will inevitably foster customer loyalty and sales growth when planned and executed correctly.
