Top 5 ways to increase Customer Engagement by Improving your Digital Strategy

Engaging consumers in today’s digital age is challenging but extremely important for the brands in order to create awareness about products and services. Consumers expect delightful online experiences from each and every brand but due to poor digital strategies and lack of proper digital platforms, brands struggle to engage effectively with the consumers and that negatively impacts the brand value.

As per the State of Marketing Technology Report, it is the voice of the consumers that matters today to most of the brands and not the traditional marketing strategies. Brands have realized the fact that satisfied customers are the key to a healthy business and maintaining a steady growth rate year-on-year.

So, in order to create awesome digital experiences for the consumers, brands need to understand their consumers’ inside-out. Let’s have a look at some of the ways through which brands can improve their customer engagement rate and reap the rewards in today’s digital age:

1. Identify your target audience and select the right platform – An effective communication channel is always needed to communicate with the consumers. Since we are now in the digital age, it is important to have a robust and an effective digital platform to engage with the consumers. A great looking website or a mobile app is not enough to improve customer engagement. In order to successfully select the right digital platform you have to understand your customers by analysing their behaviour, their likes and dislikes, their expectations with your brand and their social media activity on various platforms such as facebook, instagram and twitter.

Also, try to find answers to some of these questions as they will help you in selecting the right platform:

• What type of discussions your target audience likes on facebook or twitter? What’s their average age and gender?
• What information your target audience is looking for and where do they search for it, Facebook, google or twitter or forums?
• Does your website visitor read blogs on the website or they go through product/service description  pages?
• Do you want to engage with the local crowd or you want to target internationally as a brand?
• Does your competition uses any digital platform(s) and are they getting results out of it?

Once you are able to find answers to the above questions, it will be easier for you to identify the right digital platform that suits your business needs and addresses your customer engagement challenges based on the behaviour patterns of your target audience. It will enable you to create a digital experience that is highly interactive and engaging.

2. Building Trust by adding a sense of personal touch – Have you ever thought why companies such as Amazon or Zappos are so successful? It is because of the element of trust that they are able to build among consumers in so many years.

Trust is vital to your digital success. Creating a positive online experience is not just about having a great product or user-friendly features but about building trust among consumers through:

• Exceptional services delivery and being consistent across all digital platforms such as website, apps, social media etc.
• Quick resolution to customer complaints and response to questions related to your brand, products or services. This will help you in building trust among consumers and they become loyal towards your brand.
• Transparency in services, honesty in dealings and happily serving the customers makes your brand stand out as consumers get a sense of personal touch and they like to return.
• Safe and secure platform that enables seamless transactions, user data protection and privacy to develop a sense of trust among consumers for your brand as it will turn first time visitors into loyal customers.

3. Adding Value – It is always important to create value for the consumers in order to differentiate yourself as a brand from your competitors and you must always focus on passing on the value to the consumers through your digital platforms. It can be done by creating useful and engaging content for the consumers that is relevant and compliments your business. Some of the ways of this doing are:

• Creating content that is informative, engaging and delivers the information that consumers are looking for. You can create this in the form of blog posts, FAQs and white papers.
• Creating relevant offers and discounts periodically in order to attract new customers and create value for your existing customers.
• Creating customer support materials in the form of PDFs that are readily available for downloads on various digital platforms.
• Creating personalized experiences based on consumer behaviour and current market trends to increase customer engagement and sales.

4. Collect Feedback and work towards improvement – Asking consumers for the feedback helps in developing trust among consumers and enables you to improve your digital platforms, products and services.

You can collect feedback in the form of reviews, comments and private messages on your website, social media pages and mobile app. However, it is important to analyze feedbacks and work towards the improvements. Also, ensure that you always respond to the negative feedbacks as it is important to turn negative experiences into positive ones and consumers feel that you care for them as a brand.

Analyze the impact and make necessary modifications – One of the most important factors for the success of your digital platform(s) in creating positive experiences for the consumers is the weekly, fortnightly or monthly analysis using various analytics tools and software such as Google analytics for your website or mobile app or any marketing automation tool.

Deep analysis will help you in understanding how consumers are interacting with your digital platform(s) such as your website or mobile app, level of engagement and what needs to be modified on the website or mobile app or social media to further improve the digital experience of the consumers.

Having an effective and a robust digital platform not only helps you to create awareness about your brand, engage and communicate efficiently with your target audience but also enables you to leave a lasting impression on your consumers by delivering outstanding online experience to them.

Learn how Advanton Inc. enables some of the leading companies across the globe to engage and acquire new customers.