Engaging with your customers
6 Steps For a Successful Brand In a Changing Economy | Part 6
I don’t know about you but our email inboxes are pretty full at this time of year. After the mayhem of the Christmas sales and the buzz of a new year, businesses are revving up for an epic 2021 and want us to know what they’ve got in store. Faced with so much noise, it’s easy for us to scroll quickly past and move on with our day, but what if we could make them stop and smell the roses of your well structured EDM or if they smirk to themselves at a witty Instagram caption. Creating meaningful engagement with your customers is critical to building brand awareness so we’ve got a few do’s and don’ts for how you can do better in 2021.
Get S.M.A.R.T about your communications goals
Much like your New Year’s resolutions, setting realistic and achievable goals is the key to long-term success with customer communications. Not only does having an action plan help to keep your team on track towards your marketing strategy, but it also ensures that you’re metering out consistent content without overwhelming your audience. It can be tricky to walk the fine line between staying top of mind and overdoing it. Having a good plan with pre-determined metrics can help you to systematically review what’s working and what isn’t on a month-to-month basis. Be guided by the data, adjust your plan and then see it through. Don’t fall into the trap of working it out as you go- take the time to set a plan and then reap the rewards back as you roll out the execution, then analyse, adjust and go again until you find the balance.
Avoid fluff content by focusing on delivering value
In an attention economy, time is money. So when you ask people for their time, you’re asking them to spend their currency of time with you. Creating boring content and asking people to consume it is a big ask, but if you create value-adding material, you present a compelling offer that means people are more willing to spend their precious views, likes and clicks with you. Content pieces should add genuine value to your customer’s lives. To make it engaging, think of ways you can entertain them with interactions and games such as challenges, competitions or quizzes.
Don’t just talk about yourself
You know those people that love the sound of their own voice and never seem to ask you how you are? Yeah well, some brands do that too. Don’t be that guy. When pulling together your monthly newsletter or posting to your Instagram story, try to find the balance of talking about what you care about vs what your customers care about. Business owners are rightly so concerned with the in’s and out’s of their business whilst the customer cares about what the business can do for them through products or services. Business-centric communications are boring, unengaging and self-serving whilst customer-centric communications are more likely to engage your audience with things that directly concern them. If you need help figuring out what your customers care about, check out our article on customer perception for tips on putting together a knockout customer survey.
Stick to your tone of voice
Every good brand strategy should include some reference to the brand’s language and tone of voice- and if you don’t have one, there’s no better time than the present to get one. Just like you have a visual brand identity, the way your brand sounds is your verbal identity. Having a documented tone of voice means that when you’re creating content, you have the framework for deciding if the piece is considered ‘on-brand’. This should give you the peace of mind to roll out content that resonates with your target audience.
One last thing before you go, remember that customer communications should feel like a conversation, not a presentation. From the big face-less organisations down to the individual customers, we’re all just people creating things for other people and it’s nice to remember that there’s a person behind the computer screen that created this just for you- you’re welcome!.
Brandwell – Creative Branding Agency Melbourne