Keeping your customers engaged is crucial to your business.
To keep your audience engaged and buying your products and services long after the initial purchase, you need to foster a personal connection. Digital marketing is a key asset as you strive to make this personal connection.
Read on to learn more about how this is done, as you target long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Digital marketing & relationships
Marketing is a word that has immediate associations. When we think of marketing, we think of revenue-building strategies and sales, PPC services and SEO companies, raised profiles, and a growing audience. We might not immediately think of relationships. But, in fact, this is unfair as relationships are at the heart of all of this. Marketing needs to be a process of developing meaningful and long-lasting relationships with customers, and building the kind of audience that really believes in you and what you offer.
With this in mind, how do you build relationships with customers through digital marketing?
Create content that really speaks to your customer
You are passionate about your business and about the industry you operate in. So it makes sense that you want to talk about this and tell everyone about the topics you love. This passion is certainly important and will shine through in the content you create, but you need to temper this a little – think more about what your customer wants to see rather than what you want to say.
Take some time to research what your customer wants to know. There are many sources that can tell you this, including the following:
- Questions asked on platforms such as Quora
- The conversation on social media
- Qualitative feedback from customers and other audience members
- Questions asked directly to support
Draw upon this information and craft content that speaks directly to the customer. There is also room for content that you feel needs to be published, too – content that you feel passionate about and that you feel is crucial in your industry.
Use email to support your strategy
While content is a form of mass communication to your audience, email feels a little more personal. Yes, you are still sending marketing emails to lots of different people at the same time, but the medium of delivery makes it more effective in nurturing specific leads through your conversion funnel.
To make email even more effective in this capacity, consider your audience segments. By dividing your customers and your audience up into segments, you can get a little closer to achieving the semi-mythical level of complete personalisation for your digital marketing. Obviously, complete personalisation is almost impossible. But, by drawing upon data and segmenting your audience like this, you are making it much easier to provide them with the communications they really need.
For example, if one of your audience segments relates to a young single mother looking for ideas for her and her kids during the school holidays, you might market to this segment a little differently than if you were marketing to a retired executive with grown-up children. Recognising these nuances – and working them into your marketing strategy – will help you build meaningful relationships with customers.
Warm hearts to warm leads
If you can make your audience feel all warm and fuzzy inside, this is going to help you create warm and fuzzy leads. Well, perhaps not fuzzy leads, but you get where we’re going with this. Relationship building is all about heart, friendliness, and personality.
Consider your identity as a company. What is it about this identity that your customers can engage with? How can you add a more personal element to the content you create – something that makes customers look to you fondly?
Also, consider what makes your customers happy – what makes them feel good – and then deliver this to them via your marketing strategies. This could include offering discounts and rewards to customers at key points throughout the year — for example, when your audience might be feeling stressed and in need of support. Alternatively, this may involve simply demonstrating your own journey through the pain points and frustrations your customers may be facing, and explaining how you came out the other side.
How online marketing helps to build customer relationships
So, now that we’ve had a look at how you can build your marketing strategies with relationships in mind, let’s take a look at the rewards you can expect from this. Online marketing really does help you to build relationships, and here’s how.
Encouraging customers to stick around
Your customers don’t want to spend time searching for alternatives. If you can provide your customers with what they need, they will stick with you, and they will be loyal over time. However, with so much choice available to customers, you need to put the effort in to make sure they stick around.
Marketing is key here. If your customers are engaging with your content and your other digital marketing strategies, then they are more likely to stay with you. If your digital marketing is not hitting the mark, the connection is lost and you risk losing customers to your competitors.
Optimising the customers’ brand experience
From a digital marketing point of view, relationships are built upon user experience. If a customer is having a bad experience with you and your business, they are not likely to want to form the long-lasting relationships that you are trying to nurture. Think of it this way – if you are struggling with a colleague at work and are having a bad experience whenever you interact with them, you are not likely to want to hang out with that person outside of work and form a closer relationship with them.
This is why you need to gear all of your digital marketing efforts towards delivering a great experience to your users. Answer the questions they want answers to. Provide content and communication that is clear and easy for your users to digest, and use audience segments to deliver the right kind of marketing material to your customers. This approach to marketing will enhance the experience your customers have when they engage with your brand.
Building trust
Trust is critical – your customers are not going to form a long-term relationship with your brand if they cannot trust you. By engaging in the right kind of marketing, you can help to build this necessary trust.
By creating content that is well researched, thoroughly referenced and sourced, and delivers the answers customers are looking for, you are building a foundation of trust. If you can show your customers that you are serious about getting to know them and delivering them the solutions they really need, this will further enhance this trust.
Put digital marketing first, and the right customer relationship will follow
Make digital marketing a key part of your customer engagement strategy. Leverage the skills of digital marketing experts and social media management companies, and build the relationships you need with your customers.
Reach out to our team to learn more about how our we can help you foster this engagement and build relationships.
