Follow These Tips to Optimize Customer Engagement

The oversaturated consumer marketplace we navigate today makes it even harder for businesses to stand out, cultivate loyalty and attract new customers. Industries have become increasingly personalized and individualized. At the end of the day, businesses unable to adapt to a  customer-centric business model won’t last long in this new decade. Modern customers want to make real connections and feel valued and cared for. They of course still want a good deal and a solid product but they want an even better experience. Optimizing customer experience inspires loyalty that boosts free word-of-mouth advertising, ultimately increasing your revenue.

Understand Your Audience

The first step in improving customer engagement is understanding who you’re currently dealing with and where you stand with them. Using a customer-journey map to demonstrate how different consumers are interacting with your brand is a great first step. This will certainly vary for different types of businesses but essentially it is a diagram illustrating your customer’s steps through contact with your company. The more processes they go through when engaging with your brand, the more touch points you have, the more detailed and complex your map may get. That means it is all the more necessary for you and your team to be able to clearly visualize areas that need improvement. Along the way, keep in mind their actions, motivations, questions, barriers, and goals at each leg of the journey.

The second piece in fully understanding your audience is simply listening to what they have to say. Listen and learn what your customers want and need. Solicit feedback through incentivized (to encourage participation) surveys and observe commentary, questions, and responses via social media or reviews.  It’s up to you to find out what your specific audience believes is important enough to make or break a customer’s relationship with a brand. It might be providing an amazing shipping and delivery experience, or being available via a 24/7 chat feature or mobile app that is most important to them. From there start small and focus on reducing friction in one area that you think can make the most difference for the majority.

Curate Engaging Content

Everyone knows by now the power of social media, but it’s not enough to simply make a bunch of accounts and sit back expecting business to flow in. Successful social media presence takes some time and dedication to accurately representing your brand. Valuable content is what will be most engaging for your current viewers as well as attracting new customers. Value can be a generic buzzword but the best way to think about it is to post what you as a consumer would want to see, attention-getting, relevant content. When releasing new products and services, create a sense of “FOMO”, or the fear that they are missing out.

Stay current on new social media opportunities. New features could come at any time, such as the introduction of Instagram’s highlighted stories, which allows users to save, categorize and display their stories just under their bio on their page. This is the perfect space to post product line specifics, run contests, answer FAQs and share other updates.

There are so many ways to diversify content between the many platforms, quality over quantity is an age-old rule that most definitely applies to your brand’s social media presence.

Be Exceptional, Provide Simplicity

To today’s customers, a great experience should be simple yet exceptional. Mobile technology has made nearly everything available to them at the click of a button or a quick swipe. They shouldn’t feel like they have to slow down to be able to access your goods or services. Meet them where they are by making every effort to ensure your brand’s interactions are functional, easily accessible, most importantly, overwhelmingly enjoyable. Emotion is what helps create loyalty, and just having good experiences won’t get you all the way. You want to go above and beyond to ensure they will remember whatever interaction they had with you, your employees or your products.

Keep Track of Your Results

As you execute some of these strategies in efforts to optimize your customer engagement this year, be sure to keep track of KPIs and analyze any metrics you can collect. Not every idea will be a success. In order to best gauge your overall progress, as well as any campaign efforts that have unexpectedly positive or negative results, it’s important to identify a baseline and internally touch base throughout the year.

Use reporting from any point-of-sale software as well as social media analytics to monitor if your efforts have resulted in business growth or new engagement. Consider polling customers before and after implementing different strategies targeted to areas of dissatisfaction.

The digital marketing marketplace is continually evolving. Optimized engagement is a two-way communication and correlation of ideas between brands and their audiences. 2020 is only the beginning of what could be your business’s most successful decade. Making sure your customers are having exceptional interactions with your brand at all touchpoints (whether online or in-person) is the best way to promote yourself and reinforce your brand’s value in the digital marketing landscape.