Brand Building Techniques that Promote Customer Engagement
If you are serious about a successful brand identity, your branding, and your business, you want your customers to be as involved as possible. Creating an environment that allows customers to engage with your company will help you succeed in your business efforts in a number of ways. Customer engagement is loosely defined as an indication of the feelings of your consumers toward your brand or business. This means that by encouraging customers to become involved in your company, you are essentially allowing for real, tangible feedback.
This is different from requested feedback, where you may ask a customer about their experiences and get a vanilla flavoured response that offers you virtually no insight into your customer’s relationship with your brand. Likewise, while a five-star rating may be good for publicity it won’t help you improve your company. On the other hand, marketers encourage the engagement of consumers who will give you a real insight into the customer’s experience. By observing your customer’s activity, you will see what areas of your business are performing above average and which areas may need some work.
An engaged customer is also more likely to talk to friends and family about your “personal brand,” as well as continue to purchase from you in the future, so you can consider customer engagement a road to free marketing and loyal customers. There are countless techniques that will help you build your brand while also encouraging customers to take part in the action. We have compiled a list of the most tried and true of these techniques below that will help you build a successful brand image.
Make Your Brand Relatable
One of the quickest ways to building a brand in a way that makes customers eager to engage is to humanise it a bit through a brand building strategy. There is a variety of ways marketers create branding. Consider providing customers with your businesses backstory. Allow customers an insight on where the company started, what its original goals were, and how it is currently evolving with help them view your company from a likeable stance. Chances are that customers are much more likely to connect with a company that has a friendly front face than a corporate monster run by a hidden CEO. Think of it as a personal brand identity rather than a corporate brand identity.
Another way to make your company more relatable and encourage customers to take part in your brand is a brand building strategy where you choose an employee (or three) that is charismatic and personifies the nature of your company and dedicate them to customer relations. Customers are more likely to return and engage in conversations and events if they feel a sense of comfort, which is easily provided if they are constantly greeted by the same friendly, enthusiastic demeanour. It helps even more if this employee is an avid user of your brand because customers will tend to trust their opinion on the product more.
Provide Your Customers with Useful Content
Providing your customers with useful content will help build brand awareness, keep their attention and encourage them to check back more frequently and leave feedback more often. However, often this feedback may not be directly related to your product. For instance, if you sell massage oils, you may provide customers with information about different types of massage that are used to treat chronic migraines or the best massage therapists in your area.
While this information may not be directly related to your product, you can always slip in a little marketing here and there. Providing this type of related information will help you narrow down your customer base to those who are truly interested in your product. The more knowledge you provide to the customer, the more likely they are to trust and remember your brand in the future. Providing information on conversational topics or asking for customer recommendations will encourage them to leave feedback and become more engaged each time they check back in for new information.
Utilise the Power of Social Media
Social media is incredibly popular and it allows you one magic ability: total transparency to customers in order to gain trust and build brand awareness. You can achieve this by sharing customer reviews on your social accounts, publicly answering questions and addressing issues, and asking for feedback and recommendations. Not only are customers much more likely to engage and offer you a reply on social media, but they can easily share your posts with friends.
Social media allows you the opportunity to really build a character for your company, whether you take on a professional business demeanour or humorous tone. Customers are much more likely to feel comfortable reaching out on social media, considering most people check their accounts more than 5 times a day.
Video Marketing is the Future
Modern technology has made it easier than ever to share video across the web and social media accounts are often more than half full of strictly video content. This being said, utilising video in your marketing efforts is one of the most current and effective ways to reach your customers.
Not only do videos provide customers with an easy way to share detailed content about your brand, but they allow you to add a personalised touch to your marketing campaigns. This goes back to the importance of humanising your brand. Videos will allow you to personify your marketing campaign and portray your product or brand in exactly the tone you desire, helping you reach target customers and promote their interests and engagement more easily.
Update Your Campaign as Needed
Due to the modern speed of media updates, news becomes “old news” very quickly, and humans get bored easily. Therefore, keeping your campaign frequently updated may be one of the most important brand building techniques when considering customer engagement. Failure to provide customers with fresh, interactive content will result in loss of interest.
On the flip-side, however, you don’t want to change your campaign too frequently either. You should maintain one marketing campaign long enough to build brand recognition. You may consider producing new, slightly tweaked content for the same campaign and changing your direction completely only when you launch a new product or your business take a dramatic turn. Nonetheless, providing fresh content will encourage customers to stay caught up on what you offer and become more engaged in your brand altogether.
