7 Customer Engagement Strategies You Can’t Ignore

You’ve heard the saying: “If you’re not paying attention to your customers, someone else will.”

If you’re not employing the right customer engagement strategies, your competitors most certainly are. In today’s digital landscape, where every business is a 24/7/365 operation that needs to deliver an exceptional customer experience at all times, it’s more important than ever for brands to be attuned to their customers’ needs and expectations.

Customer engagement strategies can help businesses keep up with these ever-shifting standards in order to stay ahead of the curve.

Here are seven ways your company can center its entire operation around building better relationships with customers.

Define Your Ideal Customer

The customer is always right.

And when it comes to choosing your customer, you want to know as much about them as possible.

To understand who your ideal customer is, ask yourself these questions:

• What are the demographics of my ideal audience?
• What psychographics do they have?
• How does this differ from a demographic or psychographic perspective?
• What does my brand stand for and how does that align with the values of my target audience?
• What products/services can we offer our target market that speaks directly to their needs and desires in order to build loyalty and increase quality leads within the company’s sales funnel process?

Identify the Channels They Use

It’s important to know what channels your customers use, and how they engage with them.

For example, if you’re a B2B company that sells social media analytics software and your customer base is primarily made up of businesses in the United States, it would be smart to advertise on Facebook. If you do this well enough for long enough, you might even be able to develop an automated ad campaign that only requires minimal intervention from humans. However, if you’re an eCommerce site like Zappos or Amazon selling clothing and entertainment products to consumers throughout the world, then traditional advertising won’t work as well for growing your business since there are too many variables involved — like language barriers — that could make it difficult for people outside of America (or Europe) to find what they want easily enough through search engines alone.

Improve Chatbot Performance

Chatbots are an important part of the customer experience journey, but they aren’t perfect. For example, chatbots often struggle to understand what a person really needs when they ask for help. In fact, one study found that chatbot performance has actually decreased in recent years because of their inability to correctly process natural language and complex requests from customers.

That’s not all. Another common problem with chatbots is that they can be too rigid – meaning that if you don’t follow the right order of questions or provide the correct information, then it’s unlikely that your issue will get resolved. To improve this situation (and many others like it), companies should leverage artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms so that their bots learn from past conversations and predict next best actions based on what they’ve already learned about past interactions between humans and machines.

AI-powered conversational systems have made huge strides — so much so that now even small businesses can take advantage of these amazing tools themselves. They’re also proving highly effective at improving customer engagement levels among younger generations who want nothing more than convenience through technology: according to research conducted by Accenture Interactive , nearly half (45%) said “convenient access” was important when choosing how often friends contact them via social media platforms; 42% said having quick response times mattered most when sending messages via Facebook Messenger versus texting someone directly through SMS/MMS.

Optimize Your Social Media Marketing

Social media is the most popular form of communication among customers, and it’s important to have a presence on all of the major social platforms.

A study by Contently found that 80% of millennials prefer to contact brands through social media.

In addition to providing a direct channel for communicating with customers, social media can also be used as an effective marketing tool for your brand:

• Build awareness – Social media has become one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness online—one study found that 79% of millennials use Facebook at least once per week as a means of gathering information about brands they’re interested in.
• Drive traffic – Integrating links into posts is an easy way to drive traffic back to your website or landing page where users can convert into leads by signing up for newsletters or downloading free guides.
• Generate leads – When you ask questions in posts (e.g., “What’s your favorite product?”), you’ll be able to gather valuable data about what kind of content resonates with readers and how they like interacting with companies online.

Create More Personalized Experiences

To create a more personalized experience for your customers, you can use artificial intelligence (AI). AI can help you understand your customers’ needs and wants by analyzing data from their behavior, social media activity and more.

This will allow you to tailor experiences that meet those needs. For example: You may offer a loyalty program to frequent customers who spend a lot of money at one of your locations. If a customer is only buying an item every once in awhile, then they don’t need the same level of rewards as someone who shops there often. By analyzing past purchases and other data points like location, gender and age, AI can determine the best way to reward these shoppers while also encouraging them to spend more in the future.

Invest in Video Marketing

Video marketing is a great way to engage customers. The best video content is short, actionable, and visually appealing. It can be used to educate customers on how to use your products, promote your products, or drive sales directly through product demonstrations. Video marketing can also be used as an FAQ for customer questions about a specific topic such as shipping times or payment methods. Videos are welcome on most social platforms including Facebook and Instagram so you don’t have to worry about having the room in your budget for it.

Innovate with Artificial Intelligence

The best way to think about AI is as a tool. It’s not a solution—it’s an approach that helps you solve problems, or get more done with less effort.

You can use AI to engage with your customers in new ways and boost your business.

To learn more about how LinkLive is helping businesses create better customer engagement experiences, request a demo today.

LinkLive is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses create better customer engagement experiences.

It’s used by many different types of businesses, including small and medium-sized companies, large enterprises, and even government agencies.

Customers use LinkLive to interact with their favorite brands in a variety of ways. The result? Better brand loyalty—which directly translates into higher profits for our customers.

Conclusion

It’s time to stop looking at customer engagement as a one-stop shop. You can’t expect one strategy to cover all your bases, particularly when customers are increasingly using multiple communication channels. Instead, it’s essential that businesses understand their ideal customers and what they want from their interactions with brands—and then deliver on those expectations by providing personalized experiences across every channel.