Marketing Funnel: Engage Your Customers
In the first of the four marketing funnel to grow your business articles, we talked about why reaching your target audience is important to begin the process of moving from the large end of the funnel to the successful conclusion of ending up at the short end of the funnel. The second phase of the marketing funnel is the phase where you start to develop relationships with consumers that eventually leads to lifelong personal and business interactions.
It is the second phase on how to grow your business that is called engaging your customers.
The marketing funnel specialists at Bryan Caplan Marketing present a comprehensive guide for how to optimize an online marketing program. Within the detailed digital promotion guide, we discuss a few ways to help small and medium size business operators connect with potential customers.
In this article, we discuss the four most effective ways to engage your customers, with the focus on explaining how to keep the conversation going with customer prospects that you inevitably want to turn into lifelong patrons of your business.
4 Ways to Engage Your Customers
Traditional marketing campaigns that date back to long before the advent of the Internet were implemented as one and done deals. Businesses created a strategy to attract new customers and when the strategy ran its course, it was dumped in favor of a new and improved marketing campaign.
The Internet, especially social media websites, has changed all of that.
As we enter the third decade of the new millennium, marketing is a non-stop endeavor that requires business operators to interact with customers during every stage of the marketing funnel. Clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University, Mohan Sawhney, says the new approach to marketing sparked by the Internet is here to stay.
“If you only talk to customers about what you sell them, they have the option of tuning out,” Sawhney said. “The motto for engagement marketing is, ask not how you can sell, but how you can help.”
In other words, customer engagement has emerged as an indispensable element of a successful marketing funnel. Let’s review four ways to make customer engagement happen for your small or midsize business.
Start by Delivering Value
Sawhney emphasizes that “Engagement marketing means leading with content, not products, and that content must be genuinely useful to your customers for it to be a meaningful engagement strategy. It’s advertising as a service, as opposed to advertising as interruption. Essentially, you’re offering customers value in exchange for their attention.”
Marketo, which provides automation marketing ideas for businesses, has introduced an extensive guide to help marketing professionals take control of different digital marketing strategies. Instead of conducting hard sales programs, Marketo instead informs and educates potential customers about the value of implementing digital marketing tactics that include email, social media, and inbound marketing. An app developed by Valspar Paint called ConnectLIVE gives potential customers the option to schedule one-on-one consultations to produce the right customized color scheme for theme for their brick and mortar businesses.
Grow Your Business as a Community
“A key part of engagement marketing is giving customers an opportunity for a dialogue, not only with your brand, but with each other,” Sawhney stated. “You can get the conversation started by asking for opinions and insights, weighing in on interesting trends, and bringing customers together in online social-sharing communities. It’s advertising as a service, as opposed to advertising as interruption. Essentially, you’re offering customers value in exchange for their attention.”
Make advertising a service, not an interruption in the lives of your customers. That is a novel concept that bears repeating, because far too many small and medium size business operators still view marketing as a one-time effort that culminates in attracting new customers. In fact, engagement in the sales funnel involves building relationships with potential customers that grow a community of customers.
Nike is an excellent example about how building a community can help grow a business. The company recently changed its marketing paradigm by focusing on giving personalized customer service, as opposed to running single advertising campaigns for different recreational apparel products. Nike now gives it customers advice on how to maximize workouts, as well as promote the various ways to build muscle.
Nike has started to build a community by engaging with its customers.
Inspiration is More than Sweat Equity
Contemporary marketing transcends the promotion of products and services. It now requires businesses to inspire their customers to take action.
Burrito specialist Chipotle set the standard for inspiring customers by running an ad campaign back in 2013 that ignited the long lasting debate about food integrity. The company released a short animated film that criticized factory farming and praised the meticulous attention to detail a growing number of food companies have paid to cultivating relationships with farmers that utilize organic food production techniques.
The result for Chipotle was the inspiration of a new generation of customers that place a considerable amount of emphasis on eating organically and locally sourced ingredients.
An Ongoing Conversation with Customers
Learning how to grow your business means knowing how to interact with your customers.
“The ultimate goal of engagement is to build an emotional connection with the brand,” Sawhney mentioned in a recent interview. “It’s a process that leads to intimacy and advocacy. It’s not a single transaction, but an ongoing conversation. You can’t expect customers to tune in only when you have a product to launch. You need to have a constant presence.”
Interacting with your customers closely follows the “always on” approach to promoting your products and services. It means having continuous dialogues with your customers, which before the Internet was conducted by interacting on a one-on-one basis.
The Internet changed the meaning of ongoing conversations with customers, and the change is a powerful opportunity for you to learn how to grow your business.
How to Keep the Conversation Going
As of late 2019, around 40 percent of the world’s population spent considerable time interacting on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. That translates into almost three billion people. You will never have such a large audience to engage your customers. Using marketing tactics that leverage the power of social media is not an option.
It should be one of the foundations of establishing your online marketing program.
Traditional advertising platforms on the radio or on television have always offered a one and out opportunity to promote products and services. On the other hand, social media is all about keeping the conversation going with your customers to foster the kind of interactions that move them deeper into the marketing funnel.
Bryan Caplan Marketing’s guide on helping business operators get started with online marketing presents compelling information on how to turn social media networks into platforms for holding ongoing conversations with customers
Headlines Should Act Like a Magnet
When you consider opening an email or reading an online blog post, what typically motivates you to spend the time required to read the entire content?
The answer is the headline.
You cannot expect to carry on conversations with your customers on social media sites by creating dull, unimaginative headlines that turn your customers off faster than politician’s acceptance speech.
The headline you write for every social media post must capture the attention of your target audience. Witty and catchy headlines work, but so do the headlines that explain what a post is about in just a few short words.
If you write a social media post that is in the form of a list, encourage potential readers of the post to click on the link and add their input about what should be and what should not be on the list.
Quality over Quantity
You have engaged your customers by creating witty and catchy headlines for your social media posts. Now, do not overwhelm them with inferior quality images, videos, and photographs. In fact, the social media posts you write to keep the conversation going should be short and informative. If you decide to upload images, videos, or photos, make sure to present high quality resolutions.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. You do not want the words to be full of expletives. There are plenty of stock photo sites online where you can find high-quality images and photographs.
Long Live the King
The king being the content you present for every social media post. Like the mundane phone calls you have with a friend, lame social media content will end any ongoing conversations you have with your customers. Social media content can be as pithy as a 140-character Twitter post or as long as a valuable article uploaded to your LinkedIn page. Engaging and informative content is the key for keeping your customers engaged online.
And the Winner Is…
Who does not like participating in a contest? Running contests on your social media channels represents a highly effective way to keep the conversation going. You have to offer a prize to the winner that oozes with value, without busting the marketing budget in the process. For example, a winery running a contest through its Facebook page can offer a couple of bottles from its vintage stash of wines. An electronics store can dangle the allure of winning a new tablet as the prize for winning a contest held on Instagram.
Respond to Comments
We have talked about the importance of responding to customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google. Your customers want to know that you heard their insights. The same principle for responding to your customers applies to social media networks. Responding to social media comments is one thing; it is quite another thing to make your response proactive in settling an issue or offering an additional product or service.
When you respond quickly to customer comments on social media networks, your customers will be much more likely to continue the conversations they have with you and your business.
Concentrate Your Social Media Presence
You have heard the timeless saying: You can’t be everywhere at one time. The saying is especially relevant for engaging your customers on social media sites. You have to know where your customers like to interact on social media, and then devote the time necessary to keep the conversations going on those few select social media networks. Above all, create profiles on social media sites that you plan to visit consistently.
You cannot start a conversation, and then simply disappear in cyberspace.
Finally, include the links to your social media profiles in every post and comment you leave online. It gives customer prospects a way to start a conversation with your business. You should also display all your social media buttons on every page of your business website.
The Bottom Line: Get Started on Facebook
We offer several tips on how to stay engaged with your customers on social media. If you were a coach in charge of creating the ultimate social media marketing playbook, the first play should be keeping the conversation going with your customers on Facebook.
There is not a more powerful way to engage your customers via social media networks than by establishing a strong presence for your business on Facebook.
As by far the largest social media network, Facebook offers several tools to help businesses keep the conversations going with both potential customers and the loyal customers that drive sales. Facebook offers customers of your business a place to leave reviews, which, of course, you respond to in a timely manner. There is also a section where you can upload posts about your business and the trends influencing the companies operating in your business niches.
The social media marketing experts at Bryan Caplan Marketing can help your business launch a highly effective Facebook marketing campaign that keeps the conversation going with your customers. We will help you create a clearly defined plan, with the flexibility to change tactics on the fly. Bryan and his team will also explain how to maximize the power of Facebook groups, videos, and analytics.
Here’s to keeping the conversation going with your customers!