The Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement in 2023
December 7, 2022
One important part of building a successful brand is maintaining positive customer engagement. If you’re not familiar, customer engagement is the relationship between your brand and your audience, and it encompasses interactions, loyalty, sales, and more.
Developing customer engagement methods isn’t always easy since there is usually a bit of trial and error as you find what works best for your target audience. Luckily, plenty of webinars, workshops, forums, and online courses share already-developed methods, which will help you save time and energy throughout this process.
With that said, let’s review ten techniques you can use to improve your customer engagement in 2023.
1. Set Your Goals
In any marketing strategy, setting goals is absolutely key. This will allow you to create a more actionable plan with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs).
Your customer engagement goals may be related to the frequency of engagement, the proactiveness of your target audience, and more. Every business is different, so it’s up to you to set the goals that make the most sense for your operation.
As you set your goals, it’s wise to break larger ones into smaller steps with trackable milestones. For example, if your goal is to get 1000 people on your email list, break it down into a timeline of when you want to secure every 100 contacts and how you intend to do so.
By setting smaller, more attainable goals, you’ll set yourself up for success.
2. Find Your Audience
In order to reach your target audience, you need to know who they are and where you can find them.
If you’re starting from square one, a good exercise is to think about the problem your product or service was designed to solve. From there, you can create a breakdown of who has this problem, the emotions they attach to it, the success they’re trying to achieve, and the failure that they are trying to avoid. Dig deeper, and define information on your target audience’s demographics, locations, and so forth.
Once you paint a picture of who this person is, start to think about where they are spending their time, both physically and virtually. Are you more likely to encounter this person at a club or at the gym? Does this person use Facebook or Tiktok?
A good trick for figuring out where your audience is at is to see where your competitors are putting their resources for marketing and advertising.
3. Consider the Context of Your Customer Engagement
Another important consideration is the context of your customer engagement. Key interactions can happen at different points in your customer or prospective customer’s journey.
For example, your strategy for communicating with those that haven’t yet purchased from you’ll be different than those who have purchased from you. Your language and calls to action will be different for those who haven’t signed up for your newsletter versus those who have booked a demo call.
It’s important to understand where people are in your sales funnel so you can meet them there in whatever way is most appropriate.
4. Provide a Seamless, Continuous Brand Experience
Creating continuity with your brand is very important. It allows your audience to have a cohesive experience no matter what channel they encounter you on or what device they are using.
There are a few ways that you can ensure a seamless experience from destination to destination. The first is to create a brand style guide that defines both your visual style and your brand voice. Visual elements like the color palette, logo, fonts, slogan, and images should be aligned with your brand’s message, voice, and personality.
Facetune, a photo editing application to enhance and retouch portraits, does an excellent job of creating a brand personality on Instagram that properly showcases its product features while keeping it bright and lively.
(Once you have built a consistent brand image and defined the brand guidelines, you can start setting up strategies to engage customers through visual and verbal communication. However, make sure you’ve prepared for all of this before launching any significant marketing campaigns.
For example, you might choose to trademark your logo and slogan to keep other companies from stealing your ideas. This is essential to protect the integrity of your intellectual property, and ensure no external entities use your branding efforts for their own gain. You also must ensure that you have all the marketing assets and tools you need to execute your campaigns.
5. Be Human
The current corporate landscape makes it easy to put humanity on the back burner. But humanity should be front and center if you want to increase customer engagement. After all, you are a human who aims to make connections with other humans.
Strive to make human connections with your audience by incorporating some appropriate humor in your messaging, acknowledging social issues, and tapping into human emotions.
For instance, Olipop’s recent Instagram post gives some insight into its team dynamic and encourages team members and customers to go out and vote.
(As you take these actions to be more human in your business communications, it’s important to understand the difference between tapping into human emotions and taking advantage of them. Compassionate and empathy will go a long way, but predatory behavior won’t.
6. Be Consistent
Consistency is key when it comes to improving your customer engagement. When you show up regularly with social media content, email blasts, and other communication, your audience knows you care.
Think of the relationship with your audience like caring for a plant. It needs to be watered regularly. You may not water it every day, and some seasons require more care than others. But it’ll shrivel and die if you fail to care for your plant.
Just like with plants, consistently nurturing your audience with value and regular communication can create thriving relationships and lead to a fruitful future for your business.
7. Use Video
Video is an engaging medium that many brands use to connect with their audiences. In fact, 92% of brands that use video in their marketing strategies consider it an important piece of the puzzle.
There are a couple of different types of videos that you can use to enhance your customer engagement, including live streams and on-demand videos. If you’re not familiar, live streams broadcast content that’s happening in real-time, and on-demand video is prerecorded content that you publish for viewers to watch whenever.
Both types of videos are engaging and valuable in different use cases. But live streaming provides the unique benefit of enabling brands to connect with their audience in real-time, no matter where they are located. Live streaming helps to foster a sense of community, even if you’re trying to reach an audience on the other side of the world.
On-demand video is also valuable because it allows you to reach even more people with replays of live events, carefully curated productions, footage of user testimonials, and more.
8. Experiment With New Technologies
One of the best parts of being in business at this point in time is that there are so many emerging tools built to make it easy to automate processes, access data, and streamline operations. We recommend embracing technology and learning how it can fit into your strategies for improving customer engagement.
For example, a customer data platform (CDP) can be a game-changer for understanding your customers. This tool allows you to analyze customer behavior and personalize the experience you provide to each customer. There are many CDPs like Segment, which can make data easily accessible to both marketing and engineering teams.
(Another valuable tool is lead scoring software, which is the technology that assesses the probability of a lead purchasing from your company. This enables businesses to analyze the effectiveness of campaigns in order to increase customer engagement and develop new strategies for even greater results. The Hubspot lead scoring software is a great example of the technology that makes this possible.
9. Partner With Other Relevant Brands
A good way to build connections and rapport with your target audience is through partnerships with other brands that share a similar audience.
For example, if you own a PR agency that serves small businesses, partnering with a marketing agency that serves clients with a similar need will enable you to bounce leads to one another and collaborate on initiatives that provide great value to your customers.
Plus, by partnering with brands that are well known and respected in your industry, you can leverage the alliance as social proof that your brand is also respectable and reliable.
10. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Many of the techniques we’ve laid out above are very actionable and direct, so you may be surprised to learn that knocking out the fear of failure is another important step in this process.
Developing customer engagement methods isn’t easy, and if you want to play it safe, you can always go with already-proven methods from marketing books to save time and energy.
But many brands are held back from their true potential because they are scared of pushing the boundaries and exploring outside of the box when implementing strategies to reach their clients.
When you work hard to overcome the fear of failure, you’ll be empowered to make the risky decisions that could land you closer to your target audience and improve customer engagement.
High risk equals high reward.
Conclusion
Your brand’s relationship with your audience is very important because it plays a major role in people’s decisions to support your business. Use the tips and techniques that we’ve discussed in this article to engage with your customers more effectively in 2023.
