What ways are you engaging with your customer?
Engaging with customers or potential customers is very important in fact in many ways it can make or break your company. The higher the engagement the happier the customer and the more likely they will buy your product. The key is to make the customer feel comfortable with you and your brand. The best way to do this is to interact with them.
I found these 10 steps helpful for me and I wanted to share them with you.
What ways do you engage with you customers or website traffic? How do you feel about engagement?
1.) Build a Group
Building groups on your social media platforms that are designated as help groups or fan groups for your products or services is an easy and effective way to interact with and engage with your customers. You can create forums on Reddit or create groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Not only does this allow you to interact with your customer base but it also gives your consumers an opportunity to interact with each other and share their experiences.
2.) Be Assertive
Rather than coming on too strong or aggressive with your consumers, try to have an assertive communication style. This means all of your conversations with customers are a two-way road where you actively listen and then proactively build off of what you heard from your customer. This is the best way to solve any disputes or issues.
3.) Host a Contest
Contests and campaigns are heavily used in social media marketing for one particular reason: They work and they work well. Offering customers a prize for simply engaging with you on social media is an amazing incentive that is sure to get most of your target demographic talking. If your business has a highly visual aspect, host a contest on Instagram where your followers have to repost your picture and tag you to be entered to win. This gets your brand out to all of their followers and garners your business credibility because consumers are helping spread the word rather than advertisers.
4.) Ask Questions
The best way to get responses from your followers and customers is to pose a question on your social media platforms, especially Twitter. Hootsuite poses open-ended positive questions that are relevant to business owners on their Twitter account biweekly. Kabbage asks a trivia question each week to get our customers talking. As a general rule, make sure you are posing thoughtful, real questions that will give your target demographic something interesting to talk about, be involved in, and help them as consumers!
5.) Commission a Case Study
Bringing in a sample size of your target demographic to request feedback is a great option when it comes to engaging your customers. This way you have direct contact with your consumer, and they can ask you specific questions about your products or services.
6.) Celebrate
You can always host a party to celebrate your business and your loyal customers. When your business reaches milestones, you should reach out to your consumer base because they are the people who got you to where you are today. Celebrate your success with your customers, and make sure they know this is your big thank you to them!
7.) Beef Up Your Content
Offering your customers exclusive content that can increase their knowledge on your industry, services, or products is a great way to gain their trust and engage with them, as well. If you offer your target demographic content on your blog and website that isn't available anywhere else, you are sure to garner a large following. Creative and exclusive content can also ramp up your organic website visits as well as SEO. You can make your content exclusive by requiring users to subscribe to your blog site; however, this doesn't mean you have to charge for subscriptions. You are soliciting readers' emails in order for them to have access to your content.
8.) Promote Your Customers
Kabbage features a customer each month on our blog as well as on our social media platforms in order to give them recognition for being loyal. By promoting your customers, you are giving them an even bigger reason to keep returning to your business. You can also promote the charities they choose to support!
9.) Respond to Reviews
Although all of your social media reviews may not be positive, these are some of your best opportunities to reach out and engage with customers. Always monitor your business reviews and make the extra effort to reach out to writers of negative reviews because it gives you an opportunity to fix their bad experience with your business or at the very least apologize and promise it will never happen again.
10.) Create Product Tours
Product tours that explain to your customers the full benefits of your products and services are a great way to reach out to your consumer base and engage them. You can easily create a tour of your business and upload it to your free YouTube account. It is sure to garner you a lot of attention once you post it on all of your social media platforms.
I found these 10 steps helpful for me and I wanted to share them with you.
What ways do you engage with you customers or website traffic? How do you feel about engagement?
1.) Build a Group
Building groups on your social media platforms that are designated as help groups or fan groups for your products or services is an easy and effective way to interact with and engage with your customers. You can create forums on Reddit or create groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Not only does this allow you to interact with your customer base but it also gives your consumers an opportunity to interact with each other and share their experiences.
2.) Be Assertive
Rather than coming on too strong or aggressive with your consumers, try to have an assertive communication style. This means all of your conversations with customers are a two-way road where you actively listen and then proactively build off of what you heard from your customer. This is the best way to solve any disputes or issues.
3.) Host a Contest
Contests and campaigns are heavily used in social media marketing for one particular reason: They work and they work well. Offering customers a prize for simply engaging with you on social media is an amazing incentive that is sure to get most of your target demographic talking. If your business has a highly visual aspect, host a contest on Instagram where your followers have to repost your picture and tag you to be entered to win. This gets your brand out to all of their followers and garners your business credibility because consumers are helping spread the word rather than advertisers.
4.) Ask Questions
The best way to get responses from your followers and customers is to pose a question on your social media platforms, especially Twitter. Hootsuite poses open-ended positive questions that are relevant to business owners on their Twitter account biweekly. Kabbage asks a trivia question each week to get our customers talking. As a general rule, make sure you are posing thoughtful, real questions that will give your target demographic something interesting to talk about, be involved in, and help them as consumers!
5.) Commission a Case Study
Bringing in a sample size of your target demographic to request feedback is a great option when it comes to engaging your customers. This way you have direct contact with your consumer, and they can ask you specific questions about your products or services.
6.) Celebrate
You can always host a party to celebrate your business and your loyal customers. When your business reaches milestones, you should reach out to your consumer base because they are the people who got you to where you are today. Celebrate your success with your customers, and make sure they know this is your big thank you to them!
7.) Beef Up Your Content
Offering your customers exclusive content that can increase their knowledge on your industry, services, or products is a great way to gain their trust and engage with them, as well. If you offer your target demographic content on your blog and website that isn't available anywhere else, you are sure to garner a large following. Creative and exclusive content can also ramp up your organic website visits as well as SEO. You can make your content exclusive by requiring users to subscribe to your blog site; however, this doesn't mean you have to charge for subscriptions. You are soliciting readers' emails in order for them to have access to your content.
8.) Promote Your Customers
Kabbage features a customer each month on our blog as well as on our social media platforms in order to give them recognition for being loyal. By promoting your customers, you are giving them an even bigger reason to keep returning to your business. You can also promote the charities they choose to support!
9.) Respond to Reviews
Although all of your social media reviews may not be positive, these are some of your best opportunities to reach out and engage with customers. Always monitor your business reviews and make the extra effort to reach out to writers of negative reviews because it gives you an opportunity to fix their bad experience with your business or at the very least apologize and promise it will never happen again.
10.) Create Product Tours
Product tours that explain to your customers the full benefits of your products and services are a great way to reach out to your consumer base and engage them. You can easily create a tour of your business and upload it to your free YouTube account. It is sure to garner you a lot of attention once you post it on all of your social media platforms.
Steve Browne, online business strategies, tips, guidance, and resources
SteveBrowneDirect
Chintan Mehta