Top 5 Small Business Customer Engagement Strategies
As most large corporations know very well, customer engagement is one of the keys to building long term customer loyalty and revenue streams. Many companies spent $100 billion on customer engagement efforts several years ago. Today, it’s probably much more than that.
However, customer engagement isn’t something that only the largest multinational corporations should worry about. Small businesses too can greatly benefit from finding new ways to keep their customers engaged with their products and brands for the long term. Below is an overview of five strategies a small business can use to strengthen its customer engagement.
Engage Your Local Audience
Most small businesses tend to exist in one specific geographic area. While you may want to expand to much larger than that, you must first build loyalty amongst the customers you already have to make that someday possible. Put a lot of effort towards engaging your local customers by providing localized content and becoming directly involved in the community. Things like charity fund raisers and child’s sports team sponsorships can go a long way to helping engrain a business into a community.
It can also pay off in a big way. Local searches performed on mobile devices have a turnaround rate of one day for leading to customers actually visiting a local business.
Engage with Social Media
Today, social media is by far the number one way companies directly interact with customers outside the sale of products and services. Social media is basically one giant customer engagement tool. It allows company social media representatives to interact directly with individual customers and receive quick and direct feedback on products and services. Before social media, obtaining the same kind of direct feedback was both difficult and expensive. Today, it’s as easy as sending out a tweet.
The audience you can produce on social media can be massive. 78 percent of Americans have at least one social media profile.
Create Content that Engages
You should also consider creating some content that supplements your products and helps keep customers engaged with your company. While this may seem too expensive for a small business, it really isn’t. Typing blog articles or creating video content for YouTube can be done for free or for very little money. All it takes is a little more effort. Overall, make sure the content your produce creates some value for your customers whether it is informing them or entertaining them.
Track Your Engagement Online
If your company is mostly an online entity or you post online content, tracking customer engagement is easier than you probably think. For example, you can use Google Analytics to show what pages of yours people are visiting and how long they are engaging with that content. It can also do things like help you keep track of the number of file downloads. As for social media, there are many choices made available by networks like Twitter and Facebook as well as third party apps to help you track user engagement with your posts. Most of these are free.
Expand Your Business through Customer Engagement
The great thing about customer engagement is it can allow you to reach customers in markets you never had access to before. Thanks to new cable infrastructure and satellite technology, nearly every corner of the world has access to the internet. If someone has a computer or a smartphone, they are a potential customer. Experiment with engaging with consumers in far away markets. You may create new revenue streams from places you would never imagine would be interested in your small business’s products.
Surviving for the long term as a company means creating a loyal customer base that comes back to your products time and time again. If you want to increase loyalty, focus on improving customer engagement. It is one proven strategy for keeping customers involved with your brand and products for the long haul.
