Customer or user engagement is one of the biggest and loudest buzzwords in the marketing industry right now. It is no longer enough to advertise your brand, to promote your products or to supply valuable content to your users. You have to actively engage with them, interact with them, maintain contact constantly, and let them feel they are an active participant rather than just a recipient of your marketing efforts. However, many marketers have a rather fuzzy understanding of what it entails and what is expected of them. In this article, we will cover some of the most common mistakes you are likely to make in the field of user engagement.
1. Posting Rarely. Posting Irrelevant Content
If you don’t post relevant content regularly and often, you basically send your current and potential customers off to your competitors. A constant stream of high-quality content is the first and most important rule of customer engagement. However, even if you post several times a day, it isn’t going to help if the content you post is irrelevant and unengaging for your audience. Do research. Study what really interests your audience.
The sheer amount of content to publish may seem impossible, but nobody obliges you to post original content only. Try being a curator in addition to a creator – share great content posted elsewhere on social media, and become a go-to place for everyone interested in your field.
2. Not Encouraging Interaction
You may be posting every day, but if your posts don’t ask for the readers’ feedback, don’t ask them questions, don’t encourage sharing, you may be effectively ploughing the water. To achieve the desired effect you have to do everything in your power to encourage meaningful interactions between you, your customers and among themselves. Ask questions, encourage comments, run competitions, use surveys and polls, promote discussions – in other words, try to make your clients feel one community rather than a collection of unconnected individuals.
3. Not Using Mobile Apps
Apps are what make smartphones what they are. Virtually every smartphone owner uses at least some barebones set of apps to make life a little bit more comfortable. Although creating an app that can really stick and make the lives of your customers noticeably better is difficult, if you manage to pull it off you can take an enormous step forward towards ensuring their loyalty. And vice versa, ignoring the opportunities the apps open up in front of you means forgoing a whole set of tools that can help you.
4. Not Keeping Nose to the Wind
If you blindly follow your own posting schedule and talk about your own topics without following what happens in the world in general and in your industry in particular, you risk missing a lot of opportunities. The thing is, it is much easier to join a larger conversation with your contribution than to create a conversation that will attract just as many people. So, if you see a hot topic currently trending in your industry, drop everything and post something relevant, inviting comments and engendering discussion.
5. Not Personalizing the Experience
Every customer wants to feel exclusive and treated not just as a part of a particular demographic. However, about 80 percent of customers currently believe that the level of personalization offered by businesses is insufficient – which means that making progress in this direction right now means greatly improving your customer engagement because it is going to show you in a favorable light when compared to the majority of other companies in your industry. But don’t be late – according to the survey by Customer Contact Week, 90 percent of organizations believe personalization will become an important part of their customer experience strategy.
6. Being Content with Doing Your Job
You may think that doing your job well is everything your customers should expect from you. This is not so in our rapidly moving world – today it is not enough. If you want to engage with your customers and encourage positive reactions from them, you should concentrate on offering added value. This doesn’t mean that you have to sell cheaper or give away freebies. Instead, you should concentrate on singling out what your customers want and giving it to them. Deliver faster. Provide valuable content associated with your product. Offer additional services that may interest people using your products. In other words, stand out from the crowd of competitors who are just doing their job, and you will certainly attract the right kind of attention, producing positive comments about your business and bringing new customers along the way.
Customer engagement is the new holy grail of marketing – moving even a single step closer to it means higher sales, better publicity, more satisfied clients. We hope that these tips will help you take this step.
