Much like ever before, driving customer engagement has remained one of the best marketing strategies for business growth. Price control and good packaging also rank among the best strategies out there but keeping your customers engaged in your business has its special benefits.
In this era of e-commerce, digital marketing has experienced an upsurge. Business brands now seek to build a large clientele or fan base. And customers are now, more than ever, more interested in long-term relationships beyond the products or services rendered by businesses. There is a new desire to feel free, comfortable, and safe with the brands’ products and services.
Business models have been successfully deployed online in recent times. With the help of social media and social media marketing, you can drive in new customers and keep them engaged online.
What this means is that with the right approach, you can keep your customers engaged in your business, either online, offline, or both. And this will be extremely beneficial to your business growth and brand image.
In this post, you are going to learn some powerful ways to keep your customers constantly engaged in your business online, offline, or both.
Why prioritize creating customer engagement?
Many businesses today have realized the importance of creating good customer engagement with their brand online and offline. The need for customer engagement is what created the requirement for jobs like digital marketing, public relations, and so on.
Digital marketers are constantly faced with the struggle to find more effective ways to drive customer engagement with the brand products they represent. They have devised means like content marketing, email marketing, social media influencer marketing, etc, to build customer interactions and popularity both offline and online.
The more customer engagement you get, the more your brand stands out. Several similar businesses are on top of their game in regard to this, and you should prioritize yours too. You have to do things better to get the public rating and trust. This will translate to a better client base and sales.
The two major reasons why you need to prioritize customer engagement for your brand are, to beat the competition, and to build customer trust and loyalty.
This article will not leave you stranded on how to keep your customers engaged in your brand online and offline. In the next section, you will see some ways to keep your customers engaged online.
How to Keep your Customers Engaged Online
Keeping your customers engaged online has been made easy with the help of social media. Social media have enabled businesses to connect with their customers and vice-versa in a very easy manner.
The following are some ways you can engage your customers on your social media platforms. Today, you can get use social media platforms to keep your customers in the loop and always look out for what next you have to offer. This may not be in a form of direct marketing but it can help build the confidence and trust of your brand in the minds of your customers.
Here are specific ways to keep your customers engaged in your brand on social media, and online in general.
1. Offer your customers real value
Asides from the product or services your business offer, create more helpful informational content that will benefit your customers. Offer more than just buying and selling, every other business is already doing that. You have to make a difference by feeding them with more value.
Value in this sense can mean anything that makes your customer more enlightened, informed, or entertained. It may be related to your business but it doesn’t have to be. In the end, your customers feel more welcome and homely with your business brand.
To do this, you can engage in any of the following tips.
Create social media content that provides insightful information to your customers, instead of constantly bombarding them with your product listings. This can be in the form of factual guides, statistics, cartoons, etc.
While doing so, you can then introduce your own products or services within the content. This makes your customer feel that you are interested in them personally, as much as you want to market your product.
2. Provide some form of entertainment
Business is more fun and interesting when your customers are happy. When you entertain your customers through your content, you are indirectly telling them that you are happy with what you do. It turns out customers are more attracted to someone who loves what he/she is doing.
Another great way you can entertain your customers is by hosting events for them. These could be virtual or offline events. This reinforces in their minds that you are willing to go the extra mile for them, and that will make them reciprocate it for you when it comes to your business.
Entertainment events also afford you the opportunity to build a one-on-one relationship with your customers, as it makes it possible to interact with them, either offline or online. This will be beneficial to your business.
One last thing, you can convert the excerpts, pictures and videos, and interview sessions from the event into another form of brand awareness when you share these on your social media platforms and posters. The possibilities are endless as long as you want your customers to stay entertained.
3. Use push notifications
Text message marketing techniques help you keep your customers engaged by notifying them about new content and products. Text message marketing is not so popular today because of the easier and better channels available. One of these is the use of opt-in forms on your web store.
Opt-in forms come as subscription forms that allow users and customers to subscribe to your notifications. These could be email notifications or text message notifications.
Push notifications, on the other hand, are usually displayed on the web browser to your customers when there is any new product or service. It gives you an added advantage if you are able to set up a functional push notification service with a good customer base.
4. Have an ever-ready customer service team
In a quick survey of the telecommunication business in Nigeria in 2020, it was observed that having quick and easily accessible customer service channels was one of the best strategies in that industry. Customers always believe more in a business brand to answer their issues and problems promptly. This strategy, however, is not limited to the telecommunication industry.
Being in close touch with your customers gives them the confidence to continually transact business with you. They know that you will respond to them quickly when they need some urgent help related to your products and services.
Several channels now exist including social media channels. You can leverage them to create a highly responsive business. Remember that it’s not just about these instant response platforms and channels, it’s about the attitude you and your brand put up towards responding to customers’ challenges.
5. Create free communication
This is similar to the ever-ready customer service team discussed above. Seamless communication is useful when you need your customers to feel that they are connected with your brand, even when they have no serious complaints.
Customers should be allowed the freedom to submit reviews, suggest possible areas you can improve your product and/or services, and so on. This is only possible when you create the ground for free communication with your business brand. Once your customers feel like the communication is free and both-sided, it will keep them engaged at all times.
6. Capture customers’ hearts with interactive graphics
Multimedia content has been shown to be very effective in drawing attention and passing a message across. You can deploy them into making your customers engaged in your business. Interactive graphics could be in the form of videos, images, and other media content. These can come in handy in making your customers engaged with your social media platforms.
With the help of mobile devices, your potential customers all over the world can have an opportunity to consume your content and learn about your brand wherever they are. Digital marketing also employs this strategy in driving user engagement and increasing leads.
Just like a well-written article, a good video or interactive graphic needs to employ the essential elements of storytelling. Make it interesting, with a good flow and connection. No matter what the content is, a good connection and flow soothe the brain of every consumer.
How to Keep Your Customers Engaged Offline
If you carefully read the discussion on how to keep your customers engaged online above, you are already more than halfway enlightened on how to keep them engaged offline. It’s just a matter of translating those measures into your physical business environment.
Making a good impression on your customers offline goes a long way to keep them engaged and glued to you. Offering real value, creating a fun and entertaining environment, adopting reminders or posters that may resemble push notifications, and the rest highlighted in the earlier section above.
When your customers are satisfied with your services, they stay hooked up to your business. This might also turn them into your secret brand ambassadors who would promote your business through word-of-mouth and individual reviews.
Customer Engagement and Customer Marketing
Keeping your customers engaged is a form of digital marketing. The aim is to keep those customers you already had first contact with, at close length. This is a form of increasing return leads to your business while still working to draft in new customers.
The summary of this is that while the above points can help you drive continuous customer engagement, digital marketing tips can also be very beneficial.
As noted, creating value online, as well as offline to keep your customers hooked to your brand are not mutually exclusive. Online marketing pretty much works together with offline, particularly considering the fact that most businesses in the present day have elements of both online and physical presence.
The infographic below shows you how online marketing (by extrapolation, keeping customers engaged online) works hand in hand with offline marketing.
Keeping Customers Engaged might require some Professional Assistance
If my own experience tells me well, I would never deny that it can take a lot to keep your customers engaged. Imagine the work of creating content for your customers, organizing events, and establishing a ready-to-talk customer care team. These can be extremely demanding if you want to do it all by yourself.
The other alternative is hiring professionals who are experienced in these areas. And as long as you are paying them well enough, that could suffice. It will only cost you more money but significantly lesser effort. Choose based on your resources, but it’s okay to start somewhere, even if it is little.
Conclusion
Keeping your customers engaged with your brand is a very wise strategy to get more leads. While it can help boost return visits to your business, it can also significantly increase your public signals as your customers will perpetually tell other people about your brand.
These tips in this article should help you secure good customer engagement and retention. Whichever you find easy to work with, stay consistent at it as you keep advancing.
It may be effort-demanding to try to do these all by yourself, but if you have the resources, you might want to employ people who will help you to keep your customers engaged with your brand and business.
