We all know that long before the famous internet, advertising was pretty simple and straightforward. Advertisement was all over the city and town billboards, TV commercials, radio ads, and print ads were used to promote a product, brand’s offer and customers were accustom to the sales pitch that were noticeable from miles away. With the rise of internet, its usage and social media, customers are more aware and have developed new expectations. Today, customers are no longer interested in being “pitched” for your product or services. The expectation of customers is engaging conversation and relationship.
Organization can invest countless hours and amount on digital marketing, but if the content is not upto the mark and not able to engage your target audience, then your investment will be a total waste. In the age of internet and social media, more the effective audience engagement, more will be the ROI as you can turn strangers into leads, leads into customers and your loyal customers to ambassadors for your brand.
Effective engagement starts with effective content marketing and commitment to serve your audience. Once your business goal is rooted to serve your target audiences, then your digital marketing and sales will naturally follow.
There are few engagement points that are actually helpful in providing value to your target market and result in growth of your brand.
- The first thing is to know your buyer and their personas. Before you start working on your digital marketing strategy, you need to know who makes up your audiences. Creating and studying your buyer personas is the only way to dive into understanding your target market. Buyer personas are semi-functional characters that presents your target audiences. And answers most of the questions that arises from customers. Always remember to check in periodically with your audience via polls, surveys and quizzes to understand the impact of your marketing strategy on your audiences.
- Digital Marketing should be in such a way that you talk to them and not at them. When you are creating content for content marketing, it becomes difficult to visualize that there will be a real person on the other side of the screen while you write. Keep your buyer personas handy as you write the content for posts, articles, or emails and craft a copy like you having a one-on-one conversation with one of those personas. This will help in ensure you sound authentic and not distant or condescending. Customers choose businesses that are authoritative and helpful to them in some way or the other. Your digital content marketing should show what you know and not using confusing industry language. Conversational tone is crucial for your content.
- With the polls, surveys in place; you will be able listen to your audiences and can deliver the required content. Effective engagement always starts with active listening to your target market. Pay attention to social media comments and mentions. What are your customers saying about your brand and your content. What are the questions your customers are asking. These questions are not only be for your brand but for your competitors and their contents. Take time to conduct careful social listening with these questions in mind, you will get the clear picture of your customers. Responding to customer requests and comments in your digital marketing strategy will always lead to the greatest impact and engagement. All successful brands understand that customers are people and they like to be treated like one, not just opportunities to increase revenue. Digital Marketing is ongoing conversation with those people engaged to your content.
- People trust brands that are proactive and show up for their customers. People purchases from brands that they trust. One way is to shape up expectations around how often your customers or followers are supposing to hear from you. Have a feasible expectation and do not promise if you can’t deliver it on time. Firms need to decide how often you can deliver valuable content and blog posts, social media updates, video content, podcasts or email newsletters accordingly. The pace can have number of factors but the main point here is to keep your customers engaged. If you want customer engagement at the time sales only, then your customers will sense it and will avoid the content. Also, quality of your content should be suppressed by quantity. Maintaining the consistency means your digital marketing content is valuable to your target audiences. When there is consistency in quality of content at a pace your customers can predict, you will be able to keep your brand in front of your target audiences but also encourages the idea that you are available to provide solutions, support and services consistently as well.
- Lastly, there should be human touch to all the activities related to digital marketing, content marketing and sales.
Digixito believes that creating content is crucial to success of your digital marketing efforts. Brands will reach their intended demographics, improve overall customer experience and increase in exposure to organic and paid search results and all these because of content they publish. Digixito provides solutions for your digital marketing, content marketing and many more in arena of brand solutions.
