You can’t serve your customers well without learning about their needs through connections and engagement. Customer engagement strengthens brand loyalty and forms profitable impressions for businesses and customers. Use customer engagement as a tool for delivering superior customer service and enhancing consumer experiences in the following two ways:

Social Media Relationships

“Enabling more rapid responses” and “building internal lines of communication” can enhance the interactions and touch points between companies and customers, emphasizes global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Creating a ‘listening center’ is one solution for fostering engaging conversation and important discussions. Your listening center can live on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, where people flock to discover and inform. Monitor your Facebook page, Twitter hashtags and Instagram comments to learn what your customers are saying about your organization. Actively participating in dialogue helps tighten engagement that can provide valuable insight on your target demographic.

McKinsey explains that communicating within your listening center can do the following:

• Shorten response times during a problem
• Develop a response kit
• Support metrics and analytical tracking
• Drive customer feedback and reactions

Respond to your customers’ messages to cultivate customer relationships and keep them happy. Mashable reminds us that happy customers are returning customers, and Chargify adds that “your relationships with customers lasts for years.” Nurture those long-term relationships by understanding your customers and responding to those needs with excellent customer service. These are the relationships that will refer and grow your business, even through user-generated content.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content can be so influential to a business that it even has its own acronym—UGC. UGC serves as the digital new-age way to execute word-of-mouth marketing and acquire peer recommendations that create company trust and credibility. Imagine that you host a user-generated marketing campaign that asks customers to share an experience and upload a picture to Facebook using one of your business’s products. The posted content has the potential to be shared across social platforms while eliciting likes, comments, re-shares, and re-tweets that reach more and more new leads. As you garner connections and interact with these consumers, you’re developing a deeper, mutual engagement.

Also, connected by the user-generated campaign, your consumers can “gather and socialize… and, in turn… get exclusive access to products and services” that you provide, describes Content Marketing Institute. Get your customers excited about your products and services, and boost your ROI. Reward consumers who provide UGC with special offers and perks.

Maximize user engagement with your next UGC campaign keeping these tips in mind:

• Ask entrants for video submissions through popular social platforms Instagram, Vine and Snapchat
• Request entries to have a branded hashtag and tag your company on a social networking site
• Provide incentives like a grand prize and perks for submitting content
• Minimize barriers for entering a contest and make sure to be mobile-friendly
• Feature photo content; Instagram users upload 55 million photos per day

 

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