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Customer Engagement: The Go-to-Guide For Developing Your Strategy

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The relationship between brands and consumers has been evolving over the past several years. Modern technology, and the accessibility it provides consumers with, has created new demands and expectations businesses must strive to accommodate.

Heightened customer engagement is one leading example of these new demands. Especially as consumers today expect to maintain a relationship with their favorite brands. To remain competitive within your industry and appease your customers, it’s critical your team develops a sustainable customer engagement strategy. To help get you started, we’ve assembled a basic go-to guide.

What drives customer engagement?

Developing your strategy begins with understanding the elements that drive engagement. Emotion, for instance, is a top-driving factor behind a consumer’s decision to engage with your brand or not. Although people primarily favor companies whose values align with their own, establishing emotion-evoking values is a productive first step. Gallup’s State of the American Consumer report explains customers’ emotional rationale with three statements marketers should aim to provide to their customers:

  • This brand always delivers on what they promise.
  • I feel proud to be a customer of this brand.
  • This brand is the perfect company for people like me.

When forming your strategy, confirmation of these three statements should be easily recognizable.

Communicate

customer-engagement-mobileEffective communication is a key factor in all aspects of business, particularly customer engagement. When consumers feel they are being heard and can productively communicate with representatives of your brand, you’re more likely to earn their repeat business. Apart from friendly and helpful in-store employees, there are several technologies available for effectively engaging consumers in two-way communication. Offer customers the opportunity to communicate with a member of your team 24/7 with live chat messaging tools or AI-powered chatbots for more general queries. Additionally, be sure to monitor your social profiles and direct messages to promptly jump into any relevant conversations or customer questions.

Personalization

customer-engagement-promo-offer-target

72% of today’s consumers expect brands to personalize engagement to their needs. The enormous amounts of consumer data that brands have become privy too have created new expectations from consumers for more individualized experiences. To properly engage the modern customer, your strategy must be adaptable to fit each customer’s needs and preferences.

Personalized communications such as email lists, exclusive promotional offers, and history-backed product recommendations are all viable options. The idea here is to give customers something that makes them feel like you recognize them as an individual, rather than just a number—which again, ties back to emotion. Showing interest in your valued customers with offerings they view as relevant to them, such as birthday gifts or product restock announcements, gives customers a reason to want to engage with your brand and improves the likelihood of them positively sharing their experience.

Rewards

Customer loyalty programs are a valuable asset to any engagement strategy. They not only encourage repeat purchases, but loyalty programs. These can provide seamless, omni-channel experiences. In other words, keeping customers engaged through every touch point of their journey with your brand.

starbucks-customer-loyalty-rewardsIt’s human nature to want to interact with someone or something when receiving something in return. Loyalty programs build off of this concept with the use of rewards and special offers. Many successful businesses, such as Starbucks and Ulta, encourage customers to sign up for their free loyalty rewards program. Customers can access their accounts online or through branded apps to check in whenever they make a purchase, get updates on current promotional events and track their points earned from spending. Based on points earned, customers are presented with certain rewards, such as money off or complimentary items. The inclination to want to receive said rewards can help keep customers engaged with your brand beyond just purchase interactions.

Social media

Social media is the most commonly used tactic for improving customer engagement today. Regardless of your industry or target market, odds are your customers are utilizing social media. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are all excellent platforms for both promoting your brand and authentically engaging with customers.

air-bnb-social-media-engagementUser-generated content is the most trusted type of content in the eyes of consumers. It’s important to use your business account to share customer reviews, testimonials, submitted photos or any other sort of posting related to your business. This demonstrates the fact that you’re paying attention to the conversation and appreciate your customers’ positive sentiment.

I previously mentioned that people are interested in engaging with others when they are receiving something in return. Therefore, social media can be a great way to encourage engagement through incentives. Create opportunities for your customers to engage with you on social media through interactive activities or contests. Creative photo submission contests, re-post giveaways and polling questions are all easy. yet effective. Ultimately, they keep your customers interested in interacting with your brand.

The Bottom Line

Above all, a customer who is engaged with your brand will spend 60% more per transaction and can deliver 3 times the value to a retailer over time. To maintain long term success in your company, it’s imperative you make customer engagement a top priority. We hope this guide helps get you started!

ABOUT US

CATMEDIA is an award-winning Inc. 500 company based in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1997, the company specializes in advertising, creative services, media production, program management, training, and human resource management. As a Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB), CATMEDIA provides world-class customer service and innovative solutions to government and commercial clients. Current CATMEDIA clients include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

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For more information, please visit CATMEDIA

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Social Media Marketing: How We Help Our Customers Make a Plan

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Developing and implementing a social media marketing plan is inevitable with the steady growth and popularity of social media. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter aren’t simply for personal use anymore. According to eMarketer, users are spending an average of 1 hour and 15 minutes on social networks a day in 2019.[1] Therefore, if your business has yet to optimize its use of social media as a marketing tool, now is the time. But first, it’s important to understand exactly what a social media marketing strategy really is.

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A social media marketing strategy can be defined as an overall summary of how your business plans to strategically use social media in a way that will better market its goods or services. This plan should be well thought out and detailed. As well as include an organized calendar that states when you plan to use each social media platform to get the best response from consumers.

Simply having social media accounts and using them every once in a while is not enough. In order to have an effective social media marketing plan, your company needs to be organized. Here is some insight on how we develop and organize, then implement a fail-proof social media plan for clients that will surely bring your brand’s marketing campaign into the modern age.

KNOW YOUR COMPETITION

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Not that it isn’t always important to compare your brand to your competitors, but when creating a social media plan, I find that the best thing to do is see what everyone else is doing. You should be aware of how your business’ social media usage stacks up to that of your competitors’ when creating a digital marketing strategy.

I’m not saying that you should track their every move and mimic their digital marketing strategy, but if you take a look at what’s out there, you will be able to gauge where your business should be in regard to social media marketing. Not only will this information tell you how to create a social media plan, but it can also inspire you to come up with new, creative ways of implementing your plan in order to have a competitive advantage in your field.

SET GOALS

After taking a good look at your competition’s social media marketing plan, it’s time to set goals. By this I mean set attainable, quantitative, measurable goals. For example, instead of simply saying “We want more Facebook followers,” be specific. A better way to set a measurable goal would be to state, “We would like to increase our Facebook followers by 13% within the next quarter.” This way you will be able to evaluate whether or not your marketing plan was successful later on.

REVIEW YOUR TARGET MARKET

My next recommendation would be to review what market your business is planning to target with your digital marketing strategy. This is an important topic to research because different markets use different social media platforms. Once you know what media your target market uses, you can be sure to implement the most effective social media plan possible.

MAKE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS

Social media on iphoneGo ahead and skip this step if your company already has professional social media pages, but if not, now is the time to create them. If your brand already has social media accounts, then use this as an opportunity to improve them. Clean them up. Make sure they are cohesive but also unique from one another. Nothing is less effective than a company that simply copies the same material into each of its social media accounts.

Get to know your sites. Facebook allows for lengthier posts, while Twitter is only necessary for short, concise snippets of information. Instagram is great for showing off your products and deals, while LinkedIn is more useful in building your brand and hiring. Learn how to use these sites and which ones are important to your overall marketing plan.

CREATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN

Once you have reviewed the competition, set measurable goals, reviewed your target market, and created or improved upon your existing social media accounts; you can finally create your social media plan.

Your plan should cover things such as, “How many times a day will you post?” “What content will you post?” or “Which audience are you trying to reach through each specific post?” Be sure to make your social media plan as thorough as possible. Specificity will only help you in the long run. Once your plan is in action, this will be extremely helpful.

EVALUATE YOUR PLAN

man on computerAfter you’ve made the plan and put it into action, it is very important to keep track of how it’s doing. If your social media plan isn’t turning out to be as effective as you had hoped, take the time to make changes before it’s too late. If you notice that you’re not getting as many retweets or followers as you had intended, changing the plan can salvage your brand image. Not all companies are successful on their first go around. Practice makes perfect, and in this case, if one plan fails, try another until you reach your goals.

Creating and implementing a sound social media plan can be very valuable to modern businesses due to how many people use these sites. Knowing your competition, setting goals, understanding your audience, improving your online presence, creating a concrete plan, then evaluating that plan after it has been put into action will help your business thrive through social media marketing.

Are you ready to get started on a social media plan of action that will help grow your business?? Get in touch with us today and let’s get the conversation going about taking your brand to the next level!

  1. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Social-Marketing-2015-Key-ROI-Will-Come-Within/1011305

ABOUT US

CATMEDIA is an award-winning Inc. 500 company based in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1997, the company specializes in advertising, creative services, media production, program management, training, and human resource management. As a Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB), CATMEDIA provides world-class customer service and innovative solutions to government and commercial clients. Current CATMEDIA clients include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Stay Connected with CATMEDIA:
For more information, please visit CATMEDIA

Follow us on social media!
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Instagram
LinkedIn