When you begin your own business, you’ll find out there are many different functions that you’ll have to perform. From sales to customer care to product development, you may have to do it all. Whether you are part of a small team or if you are the sole employee, there are many items you will have to deal with when trying to make a success of your organization.
One of the many duties you must think about will be content marketing. You’ll need to have these skills even if you have a great, unique product that consumers want to buy. So, you need to use what tools are available to you for engaging the customers with your brand and products.
There are several different ways you can increase customer engagement with your marketing. Here are a few suggestions for what you can do next to boost engagement in this area.
Have a strategy
Always write with intent and purpose with your content marketing strategy and ensure you’re specific about what you want to put out there. This is so you don’t have any long presentations with little or no substance. Having a strategy doesn’t guarantee success, but it will help you to better plan your actions and therefore increase the chances that you will experience growth.
The numbers back this up: information from the 2020 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends showed that 69% of the most successful companies had documented a strategy. However, 16% of the least successful ones did not.
Learn about consumer psychology
Consumer psychology allows you to assess if your brand strategy matches the requirements of your target customers or not. For instance, are you using a hard sell by pushing products, or are you taking the time to understand their needs and delivering on those points?
One way you can look at your customers’ needs while engaging with them is to have a chat box or comment box on your website. This will provide you with direct insight into the minds of your audience, meaning you can see what they want. It also gives you information on what you need to do to meet these expectations. That can include the service you provide, your products, or the overall experience on your website.
Break up your content
There will be few people who will take the time to read a block of text, especially if it has a substantial word count. So, to get better results, you could break up your content by using numbered lists, bullet points, and subheadings with relevant keywords in them. You can also use white space between concise paragraphs and have relevant videos and images which will add more value to your content.
You should think about those people who will skim your site, rather than those who will read it. You can then format it for that group and get good results, while also getting decent results with user engagement.
Streamline your website navigation
You should make sure that any visitors to your website can find the information they want within two to three clicks. If your site is too tricky to navigate, then your bounce rates will increase, and your user engagement will fall. Best practice is to check that your navigation menu is a simple one, which makes use of blog and page categories to organize it. Also include a search box for top results, so visitors can always find what they want.
Analyze your data, then test and tweak your site
You will need to crunch the numbers for you to gauge user engagement and visitor interactivity. Using platforms such as Google Analytics will give you the opportunity to get the vision you need to increase engagement on every page of your website.
There are programs available to help you with analytics when it comes to digital marketing and you can find out more about them here. Being able to analyze and predict your customers’ behavior will help you to build appropriate targets, which can then help to improve your bottom line and focus your marketing spending on areas with the highest rate of return.
Humanize your brand
Each of your customers want to feel that you understand their needs and they can relate to your brand. This can be easier for fun consumer brands than conservative ones, such as B2B companies or banks. Yet these can be humanized without trying to fit a deliberate persona that won’t connect with your audience.
You could, for instance, find someone in your company who is a natural communicator and is also passionate about the brand. They can become a thought leader for you, and you can allow them to have a voice that will humanize your brand and engage with your audience.
Create useful content
Using your content to educate your customer is becoming an increasingly common strategy, which can not only increase customer satisfaction, but also enhance their experience. One Google study has stated that 48% of smartphone users were more likely to make a purchase from a company if their mobile site includes instructional video content.
Home Depot discovered that customers were looking for instructional videos for their DIY projects on YouTube. This led to the brand creating their own, with their ‘how to’ collection now having recorded many millions of views.
Make a good first impression
A potential customer will see your interface for the first time each day. The first screen that your users see needs to carry out three certain tasks, and those that don’t do these will mean the user leaves and will likely not return:
- Explain how your product works
- Encourage customers to start using it
- Inform them about how to get help if they need it
There are a number of ways you can welcome a new customer. One simple first step you could use may be a welcome message that personally greets your new customer. Not only can this start conversations, but it can also boost conversions.
Join a Different Marketing Strategy
Software-as-a-Service companies, or SaaS, are not just taking traditional marketing techniques to a new level, they are totally taking over its place in the game. The marketing industry is experiencing a complete shift in directions as SaaS proves that greater and quicker success comes when their prospects do not feel like they are selling them, but creating relationships with them.
SaaS emphasises on important aspects of marketing, taking it to another level. These aspects include customer service, which SaaS companies hoan in on to develop community and family around their products and services; informative and educational content, which inspires their community to make a difference in their lives and those around them with these unique products and services; and influencer marketing, which is utilizing big names and passionate people within the community by either directly requesting shared posts (ambassadors) or doing things like competitions and giveaways to inspire sharing the company indirectly.
If you want to increase your engagement, you want to follow the lead of companies that rely on SaaS marketing principles.
These companies know just what kind of content to create and share in order to develop community. You could use Canva services for easy-to-use, plug-and-play templates with your theme. This allows you to put words on your photos, inspiring people to read further and possibly even head to your website or another link you offer. Improving on your content as a marketing strategy with SaaS in mind will give your company, blog, or whatever you are promoting a chance to expand as well as your social following and the community you are building.
