Audience engagement is the goal of brands hoping for online success. It helps establish a reputable online presence, a loyal following, and a healthy, growing business.
But how do you achieve it?
In this article, we will share some of the best innovative marketing solutions that will increase your audience engagement and build a more connected customer base.
Customer engagement is how you create a relationship with your target audience. It helps establish brand loyalty, awareness, and is important for the long-term retention of clients and the continued growth of your business.
Increasing customer engagement can be achieved in many ways (which will be discussed in a minute), but the ultimate goal is to encourage repeat customer interactions with your brand.
According to Mailchimp, “The goal is engagement beyond that initial purchase […] Keeping your users coming back is important to show the value of your product.”
Whether you’ve built a website, you’re selling a product, or you’re offering a service, customer engagement is essential for growing your revenue.
But what exactly does positive customer engagement look like? Well, here are a few examples:
In this section, we’ll share our top tips for increasing target customer engagement.
From experience, this can be a process of trial and error, so be ready to try out a couple of different strategies until you find what works for you.
Analysing audience data and utilising this in your different marketing techniques is essential for increasing target customer engagement.
Audience data provides valuable insights into your audience, from demographics and location to income, marital status, and interests/online habits. This information can be used to improve the relevance and effectiveness of your engagement strategy.
You can also take things one step further by analysing engagement data from your website and social channels. This is data specific to user interactions with your website, social media, and email campaigns. It showcases useful information such as likes, clicks, shares, and comments to help you understand how users are engaging with your content and what kind of changes should be made to enhance this engagement.
Once you have the information above, and you understand it, you can create a focused marketing innovation strategy that propels your business forward and establishes long-term customer engagement and loyalty.
What are your goals for customer engagement? Do you want to attract a particular number of visitors to your site, do you want to get more reviews for Google, do you want to create content that goes viral? Every business has their own unique marketing goals and, therefore, their own specific marketing strategies.
Taking the time to identify your goals for increasing customer engagement is an important step in your marketing journey. The reason for this is that it ensures your efforts are targeted and specific and helps drive more customers to your website.
This avoids wasted time, helps create a roadmap outlining your journey to success and keeps you on track.
Top tip: It’s important to set your engagement goals based on what your audience data tells you. Goals that are separate from this may not achieve the success you are hoping for.
Of course, it’s important to mention that customers’ needs and wants change over time. Therefore, you must stay connected with your target audience and be ready to listen to their requests so you can address these appropriately.
The Harvard Business Review put it best when they said: “Companies need to accept their customers as ever-changing, complex people deeply impacted by unpredictable external forces […] Businesses are deeply attuned to the forces that most profoundly affect their customers’ lives, such as technology, health, and culture […] They maintain that relevance by perpetually evolving their products, marketing, sales, and service experiences as life continues to shift.”
If you want to engage with your target customers, one of the best marketing innovation strategies is to personalise your campaigns to the individual.
The most successful marketers know that campaign personalisation is the golden ticket when it comes to engaging target customers for the long-term. It’s effective, it’s personal, and according to one study – 71% of customers expect it.
Marketing innovation examples using this strategy include; Netflix, YouTube and Amazon. These well-known platforms recommend content based on individual viewing habits. And it works.
This is because personalised marketing strategies are relevant. They make customers feel that a campaign was created specifically for them. This establishes deep connections, incites trust, and helps drive conversions.
Incorporating campaign personalisation into your collection of different marketing techniques is essential if you want to engage your target customers. In doing so, you are more likely to establish trust with your customers, make them feel special, and encourage long-term loyalty to your brand.
Social media is one of the best places to connect with your customers and establish audience engagement. Social media platforms allow you to connect with your customers all over the world, delivering relevant and interesting content directly to them wherever they are.
Having an online presence can be a huge help to your business efforts. According to Sprout Social, “Even as economic constraints bear down on marketing budgets, executives are still prioritizing social media investments – and with good reason. As consumers spend more time on social media, the channel offers unparalleled access for brands to influence purchase decisions at every stage, from discovery to advocacy.”
What’s more, according to research, 55% of consumers discover and learn about new brands through social media and 78% of people are willing to purchase from a company after a positive experience with them via social media.
So, a solid social media strategy can go a long way towards engaging your target audience and furthering your business success.
To boost engagement levels on social media you can do the following:
Top tip: To increase the visibility of your social media accounts, you should link to them from your website. This means people can find them and easily interact with your content.
It would be easy to look at the tips we’ve shared above, make the changes and then leave things alone. However, that won’t help you achieve your customer engagement goals and it certainly won’t help you evolve with the digital trends.
Just as the digital landscape is constantly changing, so are the needs and wants of your audience (as well as your relationship with them). If you want to engage your target audience for the long-term, you need to be open to continual learning and improvement. What you learn should strengthen your marketing efforts so that you can continue delivering results that grow your business.
We hope this article has helped provide some useful insights and tips to improve your online efforts. Marketing innovation is a constant process of growing, learning, and growing some more and we encourage you to keep expanding your knowledge to connect with your target audience more effectively.