Engaging with your customers

Engaging with your Customers

Posted on in Newsletters, Small Business Tips, SME Marketing, Social Media

You’ll know from your own patterns of behaviour that, in this day and age, customers want to be involved, to be heard and expect to have their loyalty to your business recognised and perhaps even rewarded. As a result we, as a business, really need to engage with them at almost every level of the sales funnel, repeat purchase and retention strategy. It should influence not only our marketing, but our innovation and our operations.

The white paper ‘Getting Through To Your Customers’ and distributed by B2B Marketing earlier this year, identifies that engaged and loyal customers are:

    • More likely to recommend the organisation or its products and services
    • More likely to buy our products and services
    • More likely to renew or purchase in the first place
    • More likely to recognise the brand
    • More willing to help develop products/services through constructive feedback

Engaging with our customers is mutually beneficial; the customer gets an all-round better experience and, by tracking, influencing and affecting customer behaviour, we [the company in question] can increase revenue.

Do you have a plan for developing customer engagement?

In order to build a positive connection with your customers, you’ll need a fully integrated, multi-channel plan not only to draw your customers closer (and therefore away from your competitors) but keep them close, encouraging repeat purchase whilst lowering price sensitivity and gathering insights to assist future decision making. An important element of this is tracking and measuring your success and, subject to your budget and resources, it’s not always that easy to do!

“Even in this burgeoning age of technology, 76% of revenue is still generated through non-digital means, through face-to-face meetings or by telephone.” [Source: Getting Through To Your Customers May 2015]

The stat above demonstrates the importance of the human touch and influences the popularity of engagement methods that allow businesses to show their human side, such as face-to-face meetings, events, telemarketing and personalised communications.

Is there a place for social media?

Social media can be a powerful and highly effective means of developing, recognising and rewarding customer engagement, if used properly, and noting the point above about an integrated approach.

Social Media is used by nearly 90% of organisations in the UK yet, for the most part, remains under-utilised. Due to lack of knowledge, lack of creativity and lack of resources, social media is used primarily as a broadcasting tool. Yet it offers so many opportunities for customer engagement by way of liking, commenting and sharing.

One way of doing this is to tap into an ‘app’ supported with, for example, advertising, posters and fliers. You’ll increase your number of followers, engage, recognise and reward them. There are plenty of options, including sweepstakes, instant wins, photo contents, quizzes and many more. First of all, understand your goals, and then make sure that the app will be able to deliver!

If you need assistance with your marketing or social media strategy or would like to know more about Fan Apps, please get in touch.