Are you engaging your customers as much as you could be? There are some specific ways you can find out.
Customer engagement is a broad topic that speaks to the heart of all marketing efforts. Whenever you are getting your brand message out there, you are trying to catch people’s attention You want them to remember you and ideally keep buying your products and services.
This topic is critical to the success of any business. It is not enough for you to buy advertising space and hope for the best. You need to find your audience through more modern means. Then, you need to shift your thinking and consider all of your marketing as a moment within a conversation. If you are speaking to your customers, then you need to speak to them in a way that is gripping, exciting, and unique. Find ways to make your brand stand out in their minds, leaving them no doubt that you are worth their time and energy.
Let’s go through three actionable tips that you can apply immediately to enhance your customer engagement initiatives.
Tip 1: Engage customers across multiple channels
What this means is that you are putting yourself out into the world. There are many influencers who understand this concept intuitively, but for the most part, business owners and entrepreneurs tend to misinterpret it or miss out on all its benefits.
You cannot limit yourself to the one or two social media platforms that you use in your daily life. If you do that, all you are doing is reaching the same people that you have always reached. You may become invisible even to them, too, because your strategy from one month to the next looks identical.
On the contrary, you need to spread yourself out. Depending on your customers and business context, if you have always used Facebook, for example, check out LinkedIn and Instagram. If you have always used Instagram, check out Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. Make it one of your primary goals to properly use the right social media platforms for your business.
Tip 2: Ask for feedback and then make changes based on it
Once you are engaging with your customers on multiple social media channels, treat it as a learning process. All comments and your interactions are directions that you can leverage to improve and expand on what you are doing to engage your customers more appropriately
Say, for example, that one of your customers tells you that you are posting way too often. Pay attention to that, making changes to your behaviors and techniques to bring them in line with what your customers tell you they expect from you.
Feedback will, in time, become a key driver for your customer engagement strategy. You can modify what you are doing and even add to it, setting up your brand for more sustainable success.
Tip 3: Offer special deals and discounts
Once you know your customers and are listening to them, you can also start to think about more tangible rewards for them. This is where deals and discounts will start to represent your most substantial opportunities for business growth and development.
More and more, you will find that you can help your own bottom line by cutting your prices here and there, making sure that your loyal customers feel valued. You can set limited-time events, encouraging your customers to act quickly and decisively—all of which is going to help your bottom line.
The more creative and unique your deals and discounts are, the more likely it is that your customers will respond to them. Try packaging together multiple products and services, thinking up exclusive offers, and carving out specific packages for customer segments. Each of these tactics is going to keep your customers engaged.
Always be engaging
There is no way to overstate it: customer engagement will help your brand thrive. You can move past any stagnation that you have experienced and tap into sales that you may have never thought possible.
When something new is coming from your brand, people are going to pay attention to it. Everyone loves to discover new products and ideas. You want to keep others as informed as possible about the work that you are doing and what it means to them.
Every time you engage your customers, you are building something with them. You are communicating their importance to you and reiterating your value to them. They will reward you by generating repeat business.
