Five Ways to Engage Your Audience through Social Media Marketing
Social media nowadays is more than just the latest website teens flock to with stories of their lives. It is, instead, a means by which people can connect. By extension, it is a means by which companies can reach their customers while growing their audience. If implemented correctly, social media is an extremely powerful tool that can either make or break your success.
Know the Audience
Before you can even hope to come up with an engaging social media marketing campaign, you have to know who it is for. Different groups of consumers find vastly different things entertaining. In addition, what they find relevant to making a decision also varies widely. The better you know the group you are trying to appeal to, the better you can shape your image and your message. This alone allows you to focus in on the specifics, giving you the power to immediately veto anything that falls outside the realm of acceptable.
Know your Goals
What are you hoping to achieve with the campaign? Wanting to expand your brand requires a far different approach than wanting to maintain the loyalty of your current customers. Take the time to create an extensively detailed list of all of the goals you are hoping to achieve. Once written down, you can isolate the common theme and build from there. Audiences respond much better to organized social media marketing than they do to disjointed collections of shots in the dark.
Know your Customers
This is more than simply being aware of who usually buys your product. This is actually getting to know your customer base. Social media marketing has made it that much easier for people to reach out directly to companies they like or have a problem with. Scouring feeds and forums will yield extensive discussions on both important and not so important topics. Take out the gems and utilize them to make the company better than it currently is. If your customers know that you are listening to their desires, they will be much more inclined to stay.
Know the Metrics
The proof is in the results, but this is impossible if there are no results to pull from. Find a way to quantitatively measure how people respond to certain things. With this collection of data and graphs, you will be able to accurately predict how things will go in the future. Without it, you’re simply flying blind, hoping that what you do yields results.
Know the Value
People love good news no matter how much current media would not want you to believe this. Keep your community active by sharing with them the great things your company has been up to because of them. If they feel responsible for adding to great causes, they will have a much more vested interest in continuing their support of your business.
Customer engagement is far from a hard goal to strive for. Instead of seeing it as a challenging new outlet, look at it as an active collaboration of everyone who wants the best.
