Defining Customer Engagement
Although we ARE talking about relationships here, a custoemr engagement strategy is not the kind where you “put a ring on it”.
Customer engagement is mostly about touchpoints. These are small interactions with your ideal customer that build a relationship between them and your brand. Touchpoints happen in every aspect of your business. They show up in how your brand looks, how you respond on social media and even the personality of your brand.
So how can you GET CLEAR on your customer engagement? Here are some questions you need to ask yourself…
Identifiying Your Customer
If you don’t have your ideal customer identified, review the previous post How to GET CLEAR on your Customer first. That is foundational to creating the right touch points. Otherwise, you’ll be creating a marketing funnel that doesn’t bring you any revenue. Knowing your ideal customer is step one and you should already have that dialed in before you go any further.
Focus On One Offer At A Time
Most businesses have more than one product or service. However, when building your marketing strategy, focus on a single offering. Think about your most profitable product. What problem does it solve for your customer? What path should your customers follow to purchase that product or service from you?
Make a list of all the touchpoints you will need to create with your customer during this sales process.
Map Your Strategy
With an online business, your customer is going to be interacting with you through multiple pieces of software across various platforms. When you GET CLEAR on your engagement, you identify what those platforms will be and how you will get the most use out of them.
It’s easy to get hung up on tools and platforms. We know. We see it time and time again in our GET CLEAR™ Workshop sessions. When clients come to us with a truckload of software they are using to piece together their marketing strategy, we usually discover they aren’t using the tool to its full potential or they have 3 other tools that do the same thing.
That’s a lot of wasted time and money going down the drain!
Oftentimes, tools are actually shiny objects that impede your marketing rather than optimize it. Software is great, but the simpler the better.
And here’s a bonus tip: let an expert set up your software for you. Would you let a mechanic perform surgery on you? No, you’d want an actual surgeon to do that. Same thing goes for your software. You probably spend a significant percentage of your hard earned money on software to run your online business, so let an expert help you get the most return on that investment.
Define Your Personal Engagement
While automation is an amazing thing, your sales funnel needs to have a human touch injected every now and then to keep it real. This can be as simple as sending an automated email inviting your customer to ask a question and receive a personal response. It could be a chatbox on your website for customer services or a handwritten note inside their package.
Whenever you choose to inject some personal touches into your marketing strategy, just be sure you do it in a way that is scalable. If you were to suddenly have 500 customers all responding at once, could you still provide that level of service? Could you hire an assistant to handle those tasks for you? Make sure human interactions can be handled by a team that knows and understands your brand and will act as an extension of you.
Understand Why Your Client Engages With You
Your customer isn’t a robot that just clicks on any old Facebook link and ends up on your site. Your customer has to have a reason to engage with you. And once they do, they need even more reasons to stick around.
So what makes your brand more trustworthy than your competitor? Why should they buy from you instead? Is your brand more fun? Does it inspire them?
Identifying your brand’s touchpoints is an important part of our GET CLEAR strategy because it sets the stage for building solid marketing funnels and keeping the customer engaged with your business. Think about all the ways your customer “touches” your brand… emails, social media channels, advertising, phone calls, online reviews, and even word of mouth. Every interaction counts.
When you GET CLEAR on your engagement, you identify all the ways your customer interacts with you. Is your traffic hot or cold? Is your ideal customer currently engaging with you? Why or why not?
Also, consider all of the ways your customer could be interacting with you but isn’t. Are there other social channels you can tap into? Do you have a repeatable sales funnel in place? Are you capturing email addresses and building a mailing list? These are all touch points that will draw your customer into a deeper relationship with your brand and turn visitors into lifetime customers.
Creating Your Customer Engagement Strategy
Building out your customer engagement strategy can be one of the toughest pieces. There are so many directions you can go… email campaigns, social media, paid ads, webinars, and so much more.
Our best advice is to pick one strategy and master that one first. Email automation is usually the most effective and least expensive to set up and get started. Stick with and learn aas much as you can or hire an expert to help you build out a solid, repeatable strategy.
Knowing everything about your customer and what makes them tick is a key element to having a successful business. When you GET CLEAR on your ideal customer, you’ll learn to speak their language and understand how to provide exactly what they need. And as you offer solutions to their biggest struggles, you’ll generate raving fans that turn into lifetime customers.
Every interaction you have with your customers builds your relationship and pulls them into a deeper commitment to your brand. Having a detailed plan for each interaction ensures that your customer has a memorable experience each time they connect with you. If you need a little extra help, join us for a GET CLEAR Workshop™, where we’ll help you build a customer enggement stragtey to start dominating your market.
When your customer has a smile on their face every time they interact with your brand… that’s when you’ll know you’ve created a successful customer engagement strategy.