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Is Your Business Looking to Develop a Customer Engagement Strategy?
The right customer engagement strategy can help your team achieve its marketing goals. In fact, 33% of marketers agree that putting more focus into engaging the right customers is the most important step to reaching marketing goals.
Whether you own a local coffee shop or you’re looking to expand your online business, the right customer engagement strategy can help you reach your goals. Developing a customer engagement strategy involves many different working parts.
Check out this guide to learn how to develop a customer engagement strategy.
Build Customer Journey Maps
Building customer journey maps will help you understand where your buyers are at now and where you want to take them in the future. To figure out where the customer is now, you need to consider what they’re doing, thinking, feeling, and experiencing. By getting inside the mind of the customer, you’ll be able to spot more opportunities for growth.
For example, let’s say your customer is a graphic designer who is running out of space on their computer. The customer may ask co-workers and management for advice on finding more storage space. If no action is taken, they’ll likely start to ask questions such as:
- Should I invest in external storage?
- How much does external storage cost?
They may be feeling a bit lost in terms of what steps to take and what resources to consult for help. Their frustration will likely grow as their computer gets slower and slower.
To improve the customer experience at this stage, you can create a blog post that explains how to get more storage. Or, you could create a post detailing how to decrease the size of files.
Of course, this is just one stage of the buyer journey. To develop a robust customer experience strategy, you need to understand that customers come in with varying levels of knowledge and interest. For example, a customer may already know that they want to invest in cloud storage to free up space as opposed to using an external hard drive.
If this is the case, you can create a chatbot for your website to answer any questions potential customers may have about your cloud storage solution.
Collect Customer Data
Collecting customer data can also help you build a strong customer engagement strategy. The data you collect will help you learn how you’re currently interacting with customers and what opportunities there are for improvement.
Interactional data can prove to be very useful in this case. For example, you can gather information from your brand’s social media posts, emails, advertising platforms, customer surveys, and conversations with customer service teams. To effectively understand ad use the data, organize it into a centralized system.
Once you collect and organize your data, you can begin to analyze it. You’ll likely discover insights about your customers’ purchasing habits, interests, and pain points. For example, you may discover through your data analysis that a large portion of your customers’ visits a particular news website.
To boost engagement, you can put more ad dollars toward this website. You may also find that your customers purchase products that complement the ones you sell. With this information, you can seek out ways to cross-promote the products or tie them into the ones you sell to increase sales.
Collecting data will also allow you to segment your audience based on certain characteristics. This way, you can use different marketing tactics for different customer bases.
Leverage Social Media
Social media can be a powerful resource for developing your customer engagement strategy. For one, it provides a straightforward way for companies and customers to interact with one another.
It’s also a great platform for showing your customers your brand’s personality. Not only that, but social media allows you to personalize responses to customer inquiries. As mentioned earlier, social media is also a great resource when collecting customer data.
When developing a social media presence, don’t spread yourself too thin. Instead, focus on the channels that your customers most actively engage with. For younger generations, this is likely Instagram and Tik Tok. For older generations, this is likely Facebook.
Once you choose your social platforms, you can begin to create content that aligns with your brand and you can start interacting with your followers. In addition to social media, you may want to consider making use of video brochures. You can check out this guide to learn about video brochure benefits.
Create an Emotional Connection with Your Customers
Customer engagement isn’t just about finding more ways to interact with your customers. It’s also about finding the right ways to interact with your customers.
To better engage with your customers, you need to establish an emotional connection with them. Once customers feel a meaningful, emotional connection to your brand, they’ll begin engaging with it more often.
To create this connection, you need to define your brand’s core values. Customers are more likely to purchase from brands that they feel align with their core values. When deciding on the values that you want your company to embody, it’s important to be as authentic as possible.
Customers can spot insincerity a mile away, and to fully get behind your brand, they need to know for sure what it stands for. While taking a strong stand on your values can alienate some people, it’ll make others all the more loyal to your brand.
Are You Ready to Launch Your Customer Engagement Strategy?
Now that you’ve read this guide, it’s time for your business to launch its customer engagement strategy. As you can see, there are many techniques you can implement to better engage with your customers.
Of course, customer engagement is just one aspect of improving your business. For more tips on improving your business, check back in with our blog.
