Engaging your audience is a key component to any digital marketing strategy. Multiple platforms and demographics to consider make planning with goals in mind important for getting the results you want.
What does quality customer engagement look like in relation to your performance metrics? Consider these aspects before launching your next marketing campaign.
It’s no surprise that with over 56% of the world (and growing!) on the internet, social media is an ideal way to reach a massive audience in today’s market. But when you’re trying to stand out in a sea of so many users, brands, companies, and other competing attention-grabbers, what’s the best strategy to gain traction? Check out our tips for offering engagement opportunities and how to build on them for future campaigns.
How Social Media Influences Marketing Campaign Goals
Create Easy Ways For Users to Engage
It’s easy to forget the “social” component of social media, but many of the rules that apply to socializing in real life have carry-over into the digital world. The thing about the internet is it’s still (mostly) made up of human users, so catering to human sensibilities is always a wise idea when considering strategies.
Make a Good First Impression
Introducing your brand’s vision and offerings in a clear and relatable way is an important first step to furthering any connection with visitors. Creating concise yet catchy content that conveys your values and solutions to user problems is a great way to build rapport. Keeping the voice used in website and social media content consistent across all platforms and modalities is also important for establishing brand presence and awareness.
Ask For Opinions
Social media automatically levels the playing field, as the platforms themselves are collaborative in nature. However, use this two-way street to your advantage! By offering ways for visitors to connect by sharing thoughts, ideas, or other feedback, your brand instantly becomes more relatable and is easier to envision in daily life. Ways to do this include
Polls and Surveys
Choosing to tailor questions to your brand is a great way to gather specific info, but also creating polls or surveys based on current events can lure users to respond in ways industry-specific content may not. Vary it up and see what inspires users!
Giveaways
Hosting a giveaway may seem counterintuitive as a money-making idea, but by running one as part of your campaign, you both cater to the human love of receiving things for free and also can collect valuable information like email addresses or amass followers depending on the rules binding the giveaway. Decide which of those would be of greater value to your brand before setting the giveaway.
Shout Outs
It’s amazing just how excited social media users can get when interacting with brands and receiving replies. You don’t have to have the reach of bigger companies to make commenters feel special by responding, but if it fits the tone and voice of your brand, you can get really creative with responses, like Netflix or Wendy’s, which will then potentially help garner more attention than the initial message!
Hashtags
Creating a brand-specific hashtag is a great way not only to localize all of your content under one searchable banner but a way to encourage customers to engage with your brand by using it too on related posts. Keep your hashtag on brand and succinct for best results.
Maintain Momentum By Building on the Connection
Social media has clear metrics built into its core functions for studying audience behavior through likes, follows, shares, mentions, and more. Measuring responses within these metrics can help guide your content. By studying the results of posts, you can track, in live time, what your audience prefers of what you have to offer and make adjustments accordingly. Creating content that then encourages additional engagement, such as offering discounts exclusive to followers or a bonus product if a certain post reaches a set number of likes.
Decide What to Boost and Where
Different points in a marketing journey can motivate different desired outcomes from a growing audience. More likes on a post tells social media algorithms that your content is important and a worthwhile risk to show to users. The more often you show up in Explore pages, the more likely a viewer will become a follower. However, you can experiment with offering giveaways or discounts as follower exclusives to see how that impacts your rankings. Studying the metrics of when your users are online and focusing on tailoring your content to their engagement styles will help compound the attention.
Outsmart Algorithms
Once you’ve managed to gain traction, overcoming algorithms will be easier. In addition, proper strategy within the audience cultivation step will also help springboard you over this complicated wall and into the lives of your soon-to-be customers. Timing of posts is important for increasing engagement because given all of the content available and being posted at any given moment, even well-thought-out and quality posts can get lost in the algorithm’s shuffle if you don’t consider ideal posting times for each platform.
Customize Discounts to Target for Maintaining Loyalty
Brand loyalty is no longer tied to a brand’s name; loyalty comes from quality of connection and alignment to similar core values. With so many options, each customer you connect with has done so after careful research and awareness of your brand matching their needs and additional desires for what a company should do. By valuing the human element within the transaction makes customers more than numbers; they become an integral part of the brand’s success story.
Create a System for Measuring Data
Track results using CRM software or other social media tools to keep track of your results from various methods. Since trends and popularity fluctuates online the same way it does in real life, it’s wise to have a constant system in place to remove additional variables from your information. Collecting quality data and using it properly is the easiest way to outrank the competition. Instead of trial and error efforts simply causing waste, by learning from past ventures, every campaign then has value.
Improve Engagement By Using Data
Humans love talking about themselves. By already using this quirk to your brand’s advantage and offering easy ways to engage, the return on that invested time is valuable information about your clientele straight from the source! Rather than wonder what about your product or service isn’t clicking, you will have fostered a connection to the point of being able to ask directly and get crucial feedback!
It’s important before launching strategies to have a process in place for collecting all of the data received so you can use it in a timely and efficient fashion, which in turn helps customers even more!
Read the Room-How Your Strategy Shifts for Different Platforms
Every social media platform is not created equal. While this will mean extra investment of customizing content to fit each arena, the payoff will be well worth it. Not only will you give people reason to follow you for new content in every platform where they have an account, but you’ll also be able to offer different perspectives on how your product or service can meet a customer’s need which will in turn expand your audience and help you find new demographics to target.
For example, LinkedIn began as, and still very much is, a platform built for professionals seeking jobs and looking for talent. While now sharing stories and content much like other platforms is now part of the LinkedIn experience, keeping a more professional tone in mind when creating content for said site will likely give you better results than a short-and-sweet Twitter message.
Leave a Comment
Comments (0)