Why You Need a Strategy
Have you ever thought about the amount of food that is lost or thrown away because it spoils before you can eat it or goes bag in transit to the grocery store or on the shelf?
Customer loyalty and engagement is often hard to measure and one of the most difficult aspects of running a successful business. If you do not know your average customer well, don’t know what they like and don’t like, and are unsure of how to interact with your fans, you will find is impossible to create a positive customer experience.
Creating a solid consumer engagement strategy will allow you to hit your goals because you have clearly defined what you want to achieve.
Basic Steps to Creating a Consumer Engagement Strategy
In your plan, you will need to make sure you are hitting the emotional side of your customers, but also provide them with a way to use that emotion and engage with your business.
Your plan should incorporate strategies that show your business can deliver what you promise to consumers, make them feel proud and confident they are a part of your brand, and ensure they feel like they are the “perfect” customer that your business is targeting.
These three aspects hit the emotional side of your customer and make them feel connected to your business, but these main points also give them tangible and practical ways to have them engage with your brand.
Important tools you can use to develop a customer engagement strategy
Push Bold Values
Consumers are more inclined to engage and buy from brands and businesses that have core values that align with their own. Whatever your core values are, make sure you voice them, stick to them, and create social media posts and content that reflect what you stand for. Consumers are more likely to feel connected to your brand and engage with you.
When customers are engaged and like your message, they are also more likely to share their feelings about your brand with their friends and family. Gaining loyal customers often comes through word of mouth recommendations and a positive reputation, so you should always strive for the strongest and boldest voice possible.
Be Authentic
Today, customers can see right through a business that is inauthentic and doesn’t truly care about their brand, message, and customers. In fact, it is more important than ever to produce content and do business in a way that makes consumers feel as their they are your top priority.
Speak right to your customers. Ask what they like, ask for feedback and constructive criticism, let them know you are listening to their needs and wants. Once you know, you can then find ways to implement those desires. This will help show your authenticity and who you are as a company.
Humanize Your Business
When aiming to humanize your brand, you need to put faces of your company up for consumers to see. Showcase employees on your “About Us” section, do employee spotlights on your company blog, and have members of your team do live social media videos about cool things happening in the office.
Your customers will feel like they actually know you and your company, and this goes a long way with customer engagement.
Final Thoughts
In the end, building a consumer engagement strategy and implementing the strategy into your business will go a long way to improving customer loyalty. However, it is also a never ending and ever-changing process.
You can make the perfect strategy, but you will always need to be willing to adapt and change as time goes on. Customer wants may change and you may find that some of your plan works well while other parts need to be changed, improved, or even completely eliminated.
