Getting your customers more involved is key to building a proper customer base, and the kind of loyalty from them that every single modern business desperately seeks. Sure, you’re trying to make more and more sales here, but having a good following that you can always stay up to date with will ensure you always have a place in the market for the future. And seeing as most small businesses fail just after the first year, this is crucial!
Run Some Competitions
Competitions are a huge part of driving engagement. After all, when it comes to enticing people to take a look at your social media, or to put one of your products in their basket, if they’ve got a chance to win, they’re going to race to the shelves! And when you can target them on their own platforms, they’re going to be much more likely to get involved, simply because it’s easy and they barely have to do anything.
Remember, you’re looking for customer engagement and conversion here. You need those clicks to turn into sale points, so offer them something good, and when the contest is over, it’s time to start promoting to the people who engaged with you.
Give Them a Space to Be Heard
If you have the ability to, creating a space for people both in and out of your business to come together and talk about it should be a huge part of your engagement drive. If customers have a space to talk to both each other on, as well as directly message you, they’re much more likely to get involved.
Sure, you could very well open up your own Facebook group here, but if you want to have total control and freedom over what occurs, you’ll need to choose your online community platform a bit more carefully. You can even make one of your own, such as a downloadable app, for people to keep on them at all times – push notifications are a huge part of keeping your brand on someone’s mind!
Tell Their Stories
Otherwise known as ‘user-generated content’, if you can tell a customer’s story using your own platform, it’s going to bring in engagement from those who use your website or your social media. It’s an authentic way to market, and it’s going to bring in more engagement from people who want to be featured in the future.
If you’re going to use this kind of content correctly, it needs to be something that features your brand that has already down the rounds on social media. Someone needs to have already posted it on their page, showing off about your services or products, and then you need to step in and link it back to your own page. Be sure to ask, credit, and go from there!
Your customers need to be more involved, and that’s something you’ll need to work on. But with the ideas above, it won’t be so hard to pull off.