A Customer Engagement Playbook: Building Connections That Will Grow Your Business

Customer engagement is often overlooked, but it’s crucial for the long-term success of any business.

Before the age of the internet, customer engagement took place mainly through in-person interactions and telephone conversations. Now that business takes place online, there is much more to customer engagement.

From Facebook comments to online surveys, the internet provides countless opportunities for engaging with customers. But this can be a challenge too, since there are more communication channels to manage, more customers to engage with and many brands to compete with on social media platforms.

Let’s explore the ins and outs of this intimidating topic, so that you can create lasting customer relationships that help grow your business.

Understand Your Target Audience

One of the most important aspects of successful customer engagement is knowing your target audience. After all, what’s the point of producing content and interacting with customers if you are missing the mark.

Tip #1 Gain a clear understanding of your target audience before you engage with them.

To understand your target audience, look to your already loyal customers. These are the people you know are interested in your product, so you want to reach more of these customers. Determine their average age, gender, income level, profession etc.

Some good questions to ask about your customers include:

• What are their interests?
• What is their average income level?
• How do they get their information?
• What challenges do they face?

You can also use tools like Google Analytics to research your target audience. With Google Analytics, you can see who has visited your website according to age, gender and location. If your business has a presence on Facebook, then use Facebook Insights to research your target audience.

Create High-Quality Content

Content creation is one of the most effective methods for increasing customer engagement. But, if you want high-quality results, you have to put out high-quality content.

Content must be engaging as well as valuable. It should leave readers feeling like they have gained something, whether its knowledge, information or a laugh. This not only increases the chances they will engage with you in the future, but it also helps build trust in your brand.

Keep in mind you may have a different idea of what ‘high-quality’ means, compared to your customers. Listen to your customers to understand what high-quality means to them. What are they interested in? What do they need that they aren’t getting from other sources? These questions will help you produce effective content.

Some guidelines to follow:

1. Be unique. Think outside the box.
2. Make every word count. Avoid using filler sentences.
3. Be relevant. If your information is outdated, it’s going to be less useful for the reader. Search engines and social media algorithms will also prioritize more recent and relevant content.
4. Be honest. Use only information from high-quality and trustworthy sources. High-quality research = high-quality content.
5. Use variety. Your content needs to have some variety if you want to maintain interest. Switch between blogs, infographics, videos and quotes. Keep things interesting.

Don’t shy away from social media

Today, social media platforms are more than just a way for friends to connect with each other. Websites like Facebook, Tik Tok and Instagram are huge opportunities for businesses to interact with their customers. Social media can boost customer engagement in the following ways:

1. Increased communication with customers
2. Increased responsiveness
3. A channel for your content
4. Increased brand awareness
5. Improved social listening

Consistency is key on social media platforms. Posting once a month on Facebook will likely yield poor results. On the other hand, posting on a weekly basis while engaging with customer comments and feedback will produce much better results.

Consistency shows that your business actively communicates with its customers, boosting trust and brand loyalty. A business that is disconnected from its customers has a less ‘human’ feel. With the introduction of AI, more and more customers want a more human touch.

If you lack experience with social media, there is some fantastic social media management software to help you take your online presence to the next level. Hootsuite and Buffer are great places to start.

Set the Bar High for Customer Support

Customer service is one of the most crucial forms of customer engagement. It’s where your customers will come to you with their most pressing questions and concerns. Therefore, it’s crucial that your company’s customer service department are experts in customer engagement. High-quality customer support leads to:

1. Increased customer satisfaction
2. Customer retention
3. A positive reputation
4. A competitive edge

Ensure that your customer support staff is knowledgeable. Provide them with the adequate training and resources, so that when customers come with difficult questions, they have the right answers.

Ensure customer support experts engage in active listening. Customers need to feel like they are listened to and that the company cares about their problem.

Finally, respond to customer enquires quickly. Whether it’s through email, chat or phone, get back to your customers as quickly as possible. A timely response shows them you care. This alone is a positive step towards effective customer engagement.

Analyse Feedback Data

When a company analyses customer feedback and implements changes based on this feedback, it shows they are listening to their customers. Customer engagement isn’t complete without feedback analysis and solution implementation.

Feedback analysis can help your business:

1. Gain a better understanding of customer needs
2. Improve customer service
3. Produce more relevant content
4. Manage brand reputation

So, what is the most effective way of collecting and analysing feedback data? Well, there are a few different methods. The effectiveness of each varies depending on the situation.

First, you can gauge customer sentiment through social media. Read comments to see what customers are saying. This also gives you the opportunity to respond to complaints, answer questions and in general, maintain a positive online presence.

Polls and surveys also serve as an effective way to collect and analyse customer feedback data. You can ask customers to rate their current satisfaction and give suggestions for improving your product or service. You can also find out more about customer preferences and expectations. Software like SurveySparrow can streamline the surveying process.

The downside to polls and surveys is that it may be difficult to find customers who are willing to fill them out. In addition, since you decide which questions to ask, you may not gain a complete understanding of your customers.

Customer support conversations are a highly valuable form of customer feedback. By examining support conversations, you can get a close look at common customer complaints. By identifying customer pain points, you can gain insight into which aspects of your business you need to improve. Support conversations are also a great way to evaluate overall customer sentiment over time.

After you have collected your feedback data, aggregate the data collected through various methods into Excel spreadsheets. Then conduct an in-depth analysis to understand what the data means and what business processes you need to improve. Finally, discuss and implement data-driven solutions.

Remember: The process of data collection, analysis and implementation should be ongoing if you want to continuously improve customer engagement.

Measure and Monitor Engagement

When engaging with customers, it can be hard to tell if your Facebook posts are resonating with your audience or if your customer support is satisfying customers. This is where customer engagement metrics come in. Customer engagement metrics help monitor and measure engagement, making it easier to determine if your efforts are impactful.

Here are some of the most useful customer engagement metrics:

Net Promotor Score (NPS)

This metric measures customer loyalty. Like the name suggests, this metric rates the likelihood someone will promote your business. The NPS asks the question ‘On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to others?’

If you observe a low NPS, then you need to build more customer trust.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Like the name suggests, Customer Acquisition Costs measures the total cost of marketing, sales, property and equipment needed for the acquisition of one new customer. The formula for CAC is:

CAC = Costs for acquiring new customers / Number of new customers

This is an important metric because it measures how well a business is using its resources. If CAC is too high, then its time to rethink how to allocate resources. For example, if most of your customer engagement efforts are placed in content creation, but this isn’t attracting a high number of new customers, then it may be time to change your strategy.

Conclusion

With so many channels of communication in today’s digital environment, customer engagement can be overwhelming. However, just simply listening to your customers is a big step you can take. When all other actions are based on a solid understanding of your customers, you are bound to have more success.

Companies with high brand loyalty and customer trust have taken the time to understand their audience and have implemented changes that reflect customer feedback. With time, effort and the right tools, you can create a customer engagement process that satisfies current customers and attracts plenty of new ones.