High-performing campaigns and the key role of customer experience
As one strand of a wider marketing strategy, placing a strong emphasis on customer engagement is highly effective. It builds powerful audience connections and develops long-lasting relationships. By doing so, it transforms passive customers into active contributors to your brand narrative.
A customer engagement-focussed marketing strategy is one that looks to enhance the customer experience at every touchpoint: from the first discovery call or contact right through to after-purchase care. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to restate the value of your brand to them.
Why is customer engagement so valuable?
Having engaged rather than passive customers is so valuable because it encourages brand loyalty, and keeps your name top of mind when they reach the decision-making stage of their buying journey. Typically, those customers who are actively engaged with brands tend to return for additional purchases.
Also, deeper engagement with customers can fuel organic growth as direct and indirect referrals increase. It’s at this point that engagement morphs into extremely powerful and coveted word-of-mouth advocacy.
Brands that prioritise meaningful engagement and frequent opportunities for customer interaction create higher quality, more impactful customer experiences.
The challenges brands face when attempting to gain and maintain customer engagement
Brands are increasingly challenged to engage and retain their customers’ focus. In a world where marketing messages, notifications, emails, posts, adverts and videos from other brands compete for your potential customers’ attention, meaningful engagement has never been more difficult.
How do brands boost customer engagement?
It’s important for brands to channel a customer engagement mindset and deploy strategies that deliver genuine, deeper level audience connections which offer value at every customer interaction, regardless of platform. These include:
- Creating personalised experiences
- Engaging on multiple platforms
- Social listening and interactions
- Delivering value beyond the product
- Ensuring technology is combined with human-centric creativity
To achieve this means interrogating every stage of the customer journey to ensure it’s offering value. Depending on where they are in the buying journey, this could take the form of welcome emails that genuinely feel personal rather than ‘cookie cutter’.
This should naturally be followed by a carefully considered nurture journey that is flexible and adapts as more information about their intentions, preferences and desired purchase becomes clear.
It’s important that customer engagement continues long after they’ve purchased. Arguably, it’s at this point, after their money has been spent, that a customer engagement focussed approach yields the greatest benefit.
Brand loyalty, referral rates, and reputation
Loyal customers recommend your brand: either directly through word-of-mouth to friends, family and colleagues, or indirectly through social media platforms or online reviews. Both of these approaches nurture organic growth and build long-term success.
Brands can consolidate quality customer experience by offering well designed loyalty promotions or offers that tempt customers into additional purchases, deepening the connection between customer and brand further.
High-quality and successful customer engagement strategies lead to the holy grail of brand marketing: advocacy and referral. Having customers that advocate on your behalf – whether by old-fashioned word of mouth or on social media is fantastic. This is free marketing that you don’t have to work for, and with force multipliers, means that you can reach far more people, more meaningfully than you ever could with a traditional marketing campaign.
As referral traffic increases, so too do new leads and conversion rates, higher retention rates, repeat business, a strengthened reputation and greater market credibility – all boosting commercial growth.
How Made creative agency can help you engage your customers
Here at Made, we combine our creative talents with proven, strategic audience engagement know-how to increase your brand’s audience connection. Working with us, you’ll enhance the customer experience, boost brand loyalty and retention as you drive organic growth and commercial success.
Contact us today to see what a customer engagement focussed strategy can do for your business.
