Customer engagement holds significant importance for businesses. By engaging in topics that interest customers or simply posting something that they deeply care about on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, it tends to make your business successful.
Customer Engagement: What is it?
When a customer directly interacts and communicates with the brand or company or in short engages with the company, it is referred to as customer engagement. It signifies the relationship depth that is shared by the customer and the brand. There is no rule as to who shall initiate the engagement, making it open for both, the customer and the brand to reach out to each other.
Customer Engagement: Why is it Important?
Customer engagement is the new trend in social media marketing. Every business, company and brand is talking about it and trying to devise ways to increase their customer engagement. It is not something that is likely to perish and die soon. Rather, customer engagement is important and is likely to remain a dominant strategy for a very long time.
Owing to the ever increasing growth of social media and its usage, it has provided businesses with an incredible opportunity to utilize customer engagement to further their business profits and success.
Here are a few reasons as to how delving into customer engagement can benefit a business.
- Effective customer engagement inspires customers to come back to the company resulting into repeat sales.
- Since customers come back, it also boosts your sales which further results into a growth in profit.
- It also helps making your online content marketing go viral as customers spread your content and promote your products by providing referrals and reviews.
- Customer engagement is crucial to positive social customer service. This is because customer service delves into more personalized and authentic experience for customers.
- Compelling customer engagement strategies reflects customer satisfaction which tends to positively influence the potential purchases made by the customers and builds their trust and commitment to the brand.
- Most importantly, customer engagement plays a central role in building strong relationships as well as establishes deep intimacy.
- When you need to ensure that customers make the purchase, it is customer engagement that makes sure that your brand is on the top of your customer’s mind.
- The meaningful interaction because of your customer engagement strategy makes you more connected and tuned to your customers mind as well as their preferences.
Customer Engagement and Social Media: How they Work Together?
Owing to the advances in technology, particularly the advent and popularity of social media, today’s customers have become more powerful than ever. They are becoming independent and have realized the power and control they have over their experiences. Thus, it is time that marketers consider and rethink their customer engagement strategies.
While customer engagement has always been a major part of marketing strategies, the popularity of social media channels has given a rise to a more dynamic and interactive business environment. Previously customer engagement was done face to face, through telephone interaction or an in-store demonstration. Even though these mediums helped in customer engagement considerably, nothing has been more pivotal to intensifying customer engagement other than the social media channels.
Facebook pages, Pinterest and Twitter are some of the online social platforms that can successfully help businesses strengthen their customer engagement. However, with so many social media platforms available, companies find it a bit overwhelming as to which platform they should choose that is likely to boost their customer engagement. They also find it difficult to comprehend as to how social media can help them increase the interaction and engagement with their customers.
To make you understand how social media is important to customer engagement and to keep you in the game, following are some ways that can help you improve and enrich your customer engagement strategies.
Pick one social media network and master it first
When you are initially starting to use social media to increase customer engagement, it is important that you remember to keep it simple by starting out small. There is no need to get involved with plenty of social networking websites. Rather, you should choose the website that is more relevant and promising to your business. Choose the one that you and your marketing team find to be the most comfortable. This will make sure that you get a much higher and effective customer engagement.
The key is to excel on one social media platform rather than be mediocre at a bunch of platforms. If you have social media presence on a number of platforms but they provide a below par experience for your customers, it most certainly will not increase customer engagement, rather it will result into a negative experience for them.
Be where your audience is
Having social media presence on all of the social media websites is unnecessary and also a bit overwhelming for your customers. If you have company pages and accounts on numerous social media websites, it kind of becomes confusing and somewhat difficult for your customers to track all of your pages and keep up with all of your posts. Not only that, your social media staff may also find it a daunting task to maintain so many pages.
Thus, you simply need to figure out which social media platforms your existing customers, as well as potential customers use and spend most of their time in so that you establish a strong social media presence on those networks. Rather than trying to be everywhere, focussing on channels where your customers are most likely to see and share your posts as well as engage with you. Coming up with topics that resonate with your customers and which they find interesting will ensure that your customer engagement strategy is right on point.
Focus on your top customers
It is quite impossible to have a successful interaction and build meaningful relationship with millions of customers. Since an effective customer engagement strategy requires a deep and personalized level of communication with your customers, it is impractical to believe that a company can achieve it will all of its customers. In fact, the famous Dunbar’s number theory states that human beings can only hold 150 meaningful relationships in their heads.
So, marketers should reserve their efforts of customer engagement to the most valuable and top customers. Offering them special value-added deals and some perks through social media which are not presented to the other customers is more than likely to have you gain their undying loyalty. For instance, allowing your top customers to see and order your new collection on Facebook or any other social media page, before it is made public.
Once, you have established a strong and lasting relationship with your valuable customers, they then tend to spread the word around, resulting into a wider customer base.
Be honest, be friendly, be real – be you
Generating authentic and honest posts on your social media pages, which are original and unique as well is another way to boost engagement through social media channels. Originality and authenticity is the key. Your customers are not likely to trust you if they get the feeling that they are being duped by your brand. Thus, social media can help you make your brand seem more approachable and authentic to the customers. Having a friendly and warm discussion is another way to get them to trust you. That way, customers don’t see you as some faceless brand, rather they see you more approachable and humane.
You should make sure to share content on social media that is original and not something copied and tweaked from your competitors. Copying will let you go only so far as ultimately your reputation as an honest and authentic brand will be compromised.
Publish and post content that connects and add values for your customers
Only the content that is meaningful and adds value for the audience tends to get a reaction from audience and amplifies engagement. To build relationship with customers, the content you post on your social media page should have the ability to attract and retain attention of your customers, as well as make them talk to you about it, thereby boosting customer engagement.
People tend to read up content that is practical and useful for them in their everyday life. They will then share it with friends and family. All of this amplifies the chances of customer engagement. You can even share meaningful stories on social media related to your company and brand. Telling your audience how the idea of your brand first came into being and sharing some behind the scene videos and pictures will tempt your audience to talk with you and build relationships.
Show consistency and regularity
Social media channels allow you to post consistently without incorporating high costs. Since, you can now easily access your social media pages through mobiles and tablets, it is considerably effortless to post at least once a day. Being consistent and regular in your social media customer engagement campaign is crucial. No matter how small an information or content it is, companies should make it a rule to share something with their audience at least once a day. After all, it is indeed the small ideas and things that turn out to be revolutionary.
Use social media to empathize with your customers
Customers today want to be heard and appreciated. No one likes to be taken for granted. Empath is just the key to unlock your customers and make them talk with you.
Incorporate visuals, humor and wit
Everyone agrees that visuals are what attracts the audience compared to boring texts. having relevant images that can be pinned to your Pinterest board, sharing short gifs on Instagram and Twitter or even using infographics for your blog posts are some ways that can attract customers and increase the chance of customer engagement.
Humor and wit are also essential ingredients for your content as they make your audience more responsive.
Include a call to action
After each post you upload on your social media, you need to include a call to action, telling your customers what you want them to do. This makes the audience happy as they feel like they matter. Thus, another way to increase customer engagement.
Social media is a very powerful tool to build relationships and increase customer engagement. Establishing relationships is not enough as they tend to grow weaker over time. Social media is an immensely useful tool to build on the already established relationships. However, you need to understand that relationships do not develop overnight. Similar to how you would build relationship with a person in real life, social media, being a virtual network, takes some time to build healthy and strong relationships between the customers and brands. The key is to talk with people, rather than talk to them.
Additionally, it is better that you let professionals manage your social media pages. Fortunately, help is right here. Get in touch with us today and discuss your business with us.
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