Are you engaging your audience?
It is a well-known fact that most consumers aren’t very fond of invasive advertisements or pushy salespeople. This tends to be true of all demographics. But with social media today, you have the opportunity to build your brand and interact with your customers on a more personal level, with higher levels of interaction and authenticity.
One of the best ways to build your business online is to connect with your customers through your blog and social media on their own terms. But are you engaging with them in meaningful ways? Are you engaging with them at all? Below are three ways to make that connection and build customer relations that will stand the test of time.
ENGAGING AUDIENCE INDEX:
- Create Content that Encourages Interaction
- Respond to Every Comment, Question, and Customer Review
- Make It Easy to Contact Your Company
One of the best ways to evaluate your engagement is to take a look at your blog and social media posts. Are your readers sharing your content and leaving comments and questions on your blog posts and social media updates? If your stats show your content is getting thousands of views, yet your total number of shares and comments is hovering somewhere around zero, then that is a sign that your content might not be engaging customers very well.
Take some time to ask your customers what they are interested in. Ask for shares and comments. Use polls on social media. You might even need to bribe your readers with free giveaways for participating in feedback surveys, but the info you gleam from them would be worth the investment. With a tracker like Womply, you can track what advertisements, blog posts, or links get the most views and hits. Use the analytic information to better tailor your content and get your readers interested in the next post.
Sometimes your customers might be making the effort to engage with you, yet you’re dropping the ball and not responding consistently. That’s actually very common with small businesses who don’t have dedicated social media managers or who find social media to be mysterious and intimidating. Readers notice when they see comments and questions on posts, yet nobody from the company is responding. That’s a huge turnoff and is likely to cost you business over time.
Make the effort to respond to every comment, every question, every review and every complaint. Your professionalism will be noticed and often appreciated. If you need to hire someone or designate one of your managers to the task, then do it. It can make a world of difference to current and potential customers looking at your business online.
Another way to increase engagement is to make it easy for your customers to contact you. This means enabling comments on blog posts and YouTube videos, but it also means posting multiple contact methods on your websites contact page, such as one or more phone numbers, email addresses, snail mail addresses, and even social profiles dedicated to direct messaging. If possible, your site might benefit from an instant chat function. This way, prospective clients or customers can ask quick questions, and get a response in the time needed.
Social media and blogging are great ways to connect with your target audience, but these tools are only effective if you are making the effort on your side on a consistent basis. One of the best ways to do this is to have a staff member whose job requires the task of engaging with customers on these accounts on a daily basis. It might only take a few minutes per day, but the results will be worth it.
Lots of brands fail to communicate effectively with their target audience because they lack a strategic brand communications plan. As a result, such brands struggle to gain market traction despite having decent products or services.The following article highlights the key components of a brand communications strategy that every company should strive to follow.
