The game of selling has changed over the last 50 years. Today, in order to engage customers you have to inspire and delight them. If you’re still playing with approach from 20th century you will prevent customers of 21st century. It’s all about the quality of a content. Marketers that are active when it comes to using social media in their business campaigns will have almost double effect and impact on future sales that those who are not engaged in that area. This is society of 140 characters, so the preference is in beauty of images and quality of text. Use variety of methods to inspire customers, it can be infographics, polls, and videos too. When it comes to tools for customers, know that classic emails are not that effective anymore for capturing their attention. This is no surprise when you see the statistics that says response rate for average sales mail is less than 30%.
People are using Facebook and Twitter more for business productivity and connectivity. Many marketers are saying that LinkedIn platform is probably crucial tool in building their online success. Customers are practically drowning in more then 600 mails each week spending around 28% of their time to sort them out. So, emails are not socially obligating anymore. The process of purchasing and completing offer is not that simple, as it usually goes through team of people and not a single individual. Most people are saying that they got the best leads from their own hard efforts doing cold calling, networking and being engaged on LinkedIn. Today, if you ask CEO’s for their opinion, 90% of them will agree that number one priority is customer engagement. If there’s is just 1% of engagement improvement it can bring profit of more then millions of dollars. You need to have genuine enthusiasm. Ask yourself, if your product doesn’t excite you, why should customers be excited about it?
These days there’s plenty of demand for content through every possible channel of communication, websites, classical advertising and social media. To keep up with all of this it’s important to fuel every channel with content as this will serve your goals for promotion. If you don’t take genuine interest in customers they will not get into you. If you don’t ask them, you have no idea what type of information could be useful for them. Social platforms are great place for doing this. Be ready for all kinds of conversations and don’t run away if there are more negative than positive responses. Since the rise of social media, behavior of customers has changed a lot .
It’s no wonder customers are not really interested in you because many marketers are still going with traditional push marketing instead of addressing customers interests and needs. The real goal of engagement is to involve them into more deep relationship with service, brand or product. You should go by the motto : Ask not how you can sell, but how you can help. The crucial thing of customer engagement is building that connection with brand on emotional level. Expectations and behavior of customers are always changing. So companies and businesses need to keep up with that or they will start loosing them. In order to achieve this, marketers always have to seek new, innovative ways and strategies to be ahead of customer’s demands.
