Nowadays, engaging with your market isn’t always just about selling. The reality is that given today’s landscape especially online, hard selling can actually do more harm than good to your brand. You might be perceived by your audience as a company that is only in it for their money. What you want is to build a community of followers using different online marketing strategies.
These days, companies are focused on how to engage with their customers in order to build brand consciousness that could come in handy at the right time. Unfortunately, getting your customers and your market to engage can be quite tricky. Here are some creative strategies that might become useful for your online campaign this 2019.
Ask Questions
There are many ways on how you can get your customers involved. And in reality, people want to get involved in the decision-making process of their favorite brands. So how do you ask them? Here are some of the most common strategies that you can do these days.
You can have the question on Facebook. Simply ask them what they prefer to have. Do they like to see a particular product of yours to make a comeback? Or maybe, you want to know more about their personality? These are just some questions that you can raise online. Here, you can get to know more people’s personality or preference.
Instagram now allows you to have a poll. You can ask people a simple question that can be answered by a Yes or a No. It means that you will more or less have a feel what your audience think.
Getting people to answer a poll or a survey in exchange for some discount code isn’t exactly a bad thing. Remember that sending a question or a poll via email can be a good thing since people now have access to their emails via smartphones or via their computers. You get the information that you need and you may even have an added sale since a discount code could actually influence a person’s buying decision.
Responding to Interaction
One of the most common complaints about big brands is that they aren’t listening to their audience. It means that there are complaints that usually fall on deaf ears. And up until an issue is already blown out of proportion, customers don’t usually get noticed by companies.
If you want to get people to engage, it is imperative that you are also encouraging them to interact with your brand. One way to do it is by answering people who are leaving a comment in your social media accounts. You can make use of the response to keep the engagement going, or you can also just like their comment to at least appreciate them for leaving a comment.
Speak Your Market’s Voice
Whether you are on social media or writing a blog, it is imperative that you know the voice preferred by your audience. By having a voice that your audience can connect to, there is a likelihood that they will leave a comment or even share your content via social media.
Informative Content
But before you can even think of the right voice, you also want to know the content that you should be posting online. Keep in mind that content remains king. Content that is interesting to your market can easily give you the engagement that you are looking for.
There are different content strategies that can help boost your engagement online.
Posting a blog is probably the most common means of getting your audience to engage with you. To get more people to read your blog, do a lot of research and target around 2,000 words. Google tweaked its algorithm to favor long content over short ones. And the reason is quite simple. Long content is more in-depth and holds more value. Don’t forget to include the right keywords to target new readers as well.
Photos remain as a good content nowadays. You can post your photos via Instagram, Facebook, or even on Twitter. Depending on where your audience is found, you can make use of these platforms to get more people to interact with your brand.
You can share live videos to your audience especially if you are covering events that aren’t televised. These days, you can broadcast live videos via different platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And given the improvement in technology, you now have videos in 4K.
Another content strategy is to make use of YouTube. Not only can you use this to expand on your audience and get more people to engage with your brand, but you can even monetize your video on the platform. You can feature videos every week or every month to grow your subscribers.
Among favorite videos that get a decent amount of traffic include tutorials and webinars. You also have some brands that cater highlights of events. A bit of post-production creativity and you have a video that can easily get you more viewers and followers.
Hashtags
Curating your content is also a good way to attract people to engage with your brand. Hashtags are meant to cluster similar posts. The good thing about hashtags is that it can be used on different platforms. And also, you can get people to promote a campaign all on their own by using this hashtag.
Incentivize
Though you shouldn’t be doing it often, you can get more people to engage with your brand by giving them the incentives that they want. You can offer them discounts, freebies, and even free shipping in exchange for sharing content on their social media platform. Until today, it works wonders especially for brands that want to expand their reach.
Getting more people to engage in your social media or on your website can be challenging. However, given these strategies, it is possible that you will see noticeable changes in the way your audience reaches out to you. But of course, you will have to do this in a regular manner.