It's tough out there, and encouraging customers to be loyal to your brand takes time – Katrina Bell reveals three ways digital marketing can help speed up the process.
The battle for customer attention has never been more fierce, however once you have secured that follow, you need to determine what will encourage your social contacts to make a buying decision in the future. With past and new customers spoiled for choice, here are three ways to keep them on-brand:
1. Show and sell
Potentially it is the thing that brought them to you in the first place that holds the key to a successful translation from 'like' to buy.
It may feel like a throwback, but sharing completed projects and customer feedback is still one of the most powerful shows of strength for a business. It combines a vote of confidence from your customer with a highly visual type of content that can be easily purposed for all forms of social media and your website channels. In the digital age collecting multimedia content is a doddle and has an immediacy that makes the old school testimonial seem a dusty memory.
And don’t forget to incentivise your customers to proactively co-operate with the process of a review and capture raw content that can be used in your next marketing push. There are plenty of simple release templates available online to ensure that both parties know how the images and content will be used, how you will identify the customer, and what geographical information will be included.
2. Reward principle
After the initial blush of a media and social campaign, there can often be a period of dieback in engagement. Followers comment and share less and the algorithms of the apps will intentionally choke your content in service to their need for revenue from you.
A simple way to avoid both is to periodically make an explicit call to action that includes an easy-to-access reward. It could be a competition, a seasonal discount or perhaps an incentive to share your details with someone in their social circle.
Followers who consistently see there is a tangible reason to stay connected are also followers that will have your company’s or brand’s name at the forefront of their minds. Those same followers are also much more likely to recommend you to friends, either online or IRL.
3. Get personal
It has never been easier to create email campaigns that have an element of personalisation. For instance, it could be an anniversary reminder that it has been a year since your customer visited and is there anything else you can help them with? Or something as simple as telling past customers that you have a new range they might be interested in.
Alternatively, being very specific in filtering visits from your emails or text messages to your website can also allow you to personalise the experience to a more mature level – your algorithm can easily accommodate this by determining the content depending on the source of the visit.
From there your site will preview tailored products and services that will resonate with your customer. The next level of this approach is having a home screen that includes the name of the visitor, their most visited pages and even a rundown of anything they have purchased previously. By showing you value their visit and their custom, you show your loyalty. What could be more beguiling?
