One of the biggest challenges facing brands today is closing what is known as the expectation gap – a void between what customers expect to experience and what’s actually delivered. The void is caused when brands don’t adapt traditional marketing strategies to meet modern expectations for speed and personalisation across all channels.
Delivering personalized content at the right moment is challenging. So is creating and delivering content at a high speed, across multiple touch-points, while still providing an exceptional experience for consumers.
The following approaches will help you adapt your social strategy to the modern consumer, so you can reach high levels of engagement and success across channels:
Get to Know Your Social Media Audience
As a business that is marketing on social media, you need to ask yourself this: who are we talking to? Knowing your target audience is essential to creating tailored marketing campaigns and successfully engaging customers through social media.
How to align tone of voice with target audiences
Aligning the tone and voice of your content to drive the most engagement requires an in-depth understanding of your target audience. Understanding your buyer and audience personas is critical, so you can tailor campaigns to the right segments, and have a more granular understanding of which groups your content is resonating with, and which could use a different approach.
Know Where Your Audience Is Talking About You
Are you active on Twitter, but your main audience is on Instagram?
If you don’t know which channels different audience segments are most active on, driving engagement on social media is going to be difficult. If your primary audience for one campaign is active on Instagram, there’s no reason to allocate resources towards Twitter, for example.
That’s why it’s important that you find out where your brand is being mentioned and where your different target persona’s spend their time, so you can engage your audiences at the right place, at the right time, with the right content.
Read also: Customer experience in Nigeria’s capital market: Registrars driving the Moment of Truth
You can figure out where customers are talking about you with ’social media listening’. It’s critical to determine where your customers are mentioning you so that you make sure to answer every single question a customer asks regarding your brand. Replying to your audience on a regular basis is the key to maintaining a positive brand image. After all, social media is a public channel where your existing and potential customers can see your activity and use it to evaluate your brand – which brings us to our next point.
Engage With Your Customers Swiftly and Consistently
In addition to monitoring where your brand is being mentioned, it’s also important to respond and engage as soon as possible. A fast response matters to customers – it shows that you care about them and what they have to say. But a lot of businesses are still falling well short of customer expectations on that front. A fast response time doesn’t just refer to direct questions towards your brand on social – it can also be general comments or even praise.
It is good for a brand to interact with its followers on a regular basis. But having regular conversations with your community is not the only way to engage your customers through social media.
Take user-generated content, for example. Every time a customer shares a positive social media post about your business, it means they were satisfied with your products or services. So, why not amplify their message by sharing it across your own channels?
In addition to sharing customer’s content, follow customers on social media to build relationships. It’s a lot like following a friend. You’d want that friend to follow you back, right?
Show the Human Side of Your Business
No matter what kind of company you are or business you do – telecoms, bank, insurance, restaurant, e-commerce, clothes store, whatever – you can engage with customers by simply being human.
One way to make your brand’s social accounts more human is to post relatable content that talks about common challenges, pain points, or experiences. It’s also a good idea to express emotions, with humour being particularly effective.
Finally, you can add a personal touch to your social media bio and make it about your social media manager as opposed to the company. This way, people will feel that they’re interacting with a fellow person, and not with a faceless business.
Last line
In today’s busy world, engaging customers on social media can be a challenge. Your followers are always on-the-go and constantly exposed to huge amounts of content – which makes getting their attention (let alone engagement!) difficult.
Yet, difficult doesn’t mean impossible. By learning about your audience, replying to their messages, and showing your brand personality, you can successfully establish a connection with your community and encourage them to interact with your brand.
