All CMOs can agree when talking about Digital Marketing is that numbers alone don’t matter much.
If you can’t turn leads into converted clients, having a thousand or a million followers on social media doesn’t make that much of a difference.
That is why marketing teams nowadays are eager to find a perfect customer engagement strategy. Being able to reach and make the audience take action is the key to success in the online field.
But how can you do that? How can you get more engagement from the relationship your brand has with your target audience?
In this post, we’ll show you 6 strategies that can guide you in the right way.
Keep reading!
1. Create an omnichannel strategy
First of all, we would like to go over a strategy that will enable all the following tips and examples.
Meaningfully reaching your public online is all about being available to them everywhere you can.
It means you need to think about engagement as an omnichannel experience — a journey where all those small interactions are integrated into something bigger.
This approach is more prevalent today in retail and foodservice. For example, Starbucks created a reward app that allows users to order ahead, avoid lines, and pay with their phones. But the engagement is exactly in the stars you collect doing that.
This system encourages users to interact and engage with a rich and expansive platform that combines real and virtual worlds in a more meaningful, planned experience.
Digital Marketing today is about being present in their pockets, in their habits, in their conversations. It’s about laying a path towards you and encouraging them to walk it at every opportunity.
Omnichannel is a concept that can help you achieve that — even if the goal isn’t to sell anything.
2. Invest in interactive content
There is something in our human nature that makes us more interested in something if we can actively interact with it.
To give you a simple real-life example, think about how only asking the audience to like a Youtube video makes this number rise considerably.
Consumers like to be called to action and participate in the brand’s life, be it a single digital influencer or a huge brand.
Want an indisputable case? How about the viral success of BuzzFeed?
Their quizzes have millions of shares every day and made the brand hugely recognizable in the US, and the world over, by offering fun, discussion inducing content.
So, when thinking about that journey, try to plan and create interactive content, as much as you can fit in your campaign. They should be diverse, too: quizzes, infographics, lookbooks, landing pages, etc.
3. Improve your website’s user experience
Many Digital Marketing plans are thought of as outside campaigns that don’t take the whole buyer’s journey into account.
That is a terrible mistake that no good CMO could even think of doing. It’s like spending all the budget to attract clients to a store and have everything inside confusing and unpleasant.
A good UX is about the feelings of discovery and satisfaction. When those are present on your pages, the leads closer to conversion stay longer and use that experience as a buying decision factor — even if they are not aware of it.
So start to engage more from the inside out. Invest in a full redesign with a better layout, performance, interactions, and visual identity.
It will be the perfect finish line for your audience’s journey.
4. Share opinions about your brand
People like to feel part of something bigger. Clients like to know they are a part of a brand’s life and that they can influence others.
That’s why highlighting feedback, opinions, and reviews about a company not only reward those who engage but instigate others to do the same. Make them know you value their thoughts, and they will share more of them.
5. Produce and follow live events
One evident effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was the huge growth in the popularity of live events on the internet.
Shows, concerts, reunions, interviews, discussions: companies worldwide started paying attention to the pure and direct engagement generated from this strategy.
So much that we can see a future with live streaming and content being a constant part of a brand’s Digital Marketing plan.
It can be a combination of self-produced, exclusive content tailored to your audience or part of the discussion by doing live coverage of bigger, third-party streaming events.
You can use the moment people are focused on this content to raise engagement that leads to conversion.
Social walls, treasure hunts, live participation from the audience, polls, and giveaways are examples of how the strategy can work for you.
6. Reward engagement
One rule you cannot break when trying to convert more is to never leave your lead hanging. Any action from them should result in a reaction from you.
Starbucks’ example in the first topic fits perfectly here too. The more people interact with the app, the more benefits they gain the next time they buy a coffee.
It’s the concept of social gamification. The more people talk about the brand, tag friends, participate in contests, the more they are rewarded.
Nike did that in their fitness app, Nike+. The NikeFuel program incentivizes users to share their physical activity on social media and give them the chance to unlock trophies and get special badges for doing that.
It becomes not only a validation of their effort but an engaging competition that encourages people to work out more and show their progress — all of that positive reinforcement tied to the brand.
After all, interaction is an exchange. If you want your brand or a client to gain a more invested audience, you need to offer something in return.
That means a great customer engagement strategy is all about plan an awesome user experience and give them the right rewards. Discovery and satisfaction: that’s the perfect starting point to lead them to the finish line.
Why don’t you keep learning about creating a perfect interaction with potential clients online? Check this post about content engagement!
