Customers are everything in business – that holds true for large enterprises, and it’s equally true for micro and small to medium businesses. In today’s economy, if you don’t keep your customers in focus and nurture your relationship with them, you’ll harm your sales, sustainability and growth. Let’s face it, it’s likely you’ll even end up closing.
Here are key digital strategies to engage – and hold onto – customers:
Be interactive
Directly engaging customers, either online or in-person, is an invaluable means of growing your fanbase. Here are interactive techniques that paid dividends for Dropbox and Lay’s:
- Referral Marketing: This strategy takes time and hard work but can be incredibly rewarding, if done right. Dropbox successfully employed referral marketing to raise a whopping $250 to $400 million dollars, which saw the company’s valuation rocket to $10 billon. How did they achieve this feat? They offered users 500 MBs of bonus space for each friend they referred to the service up to a limit of 16 GBs – plus the referees also received 500 MBs for signing up.
- Social media contests: In 2012, to celebrate their 75th anniversary, chip brand Lay’s ran a campaign on Facebook that encouraged customers to participate in a contest to determine their new chip flavour for the chance to win $1 million in prize money. With the help of the social media giant (Facebook), the company turned the ‘Like’ button to “I’d eat that” button. The outcome? The contest generated more than 8 million ideas. Not only did lays gain valuable market insights, the contest raised brand awareness.
Be attractive
First impressions last, for better or worse, which is why, sound website design, supported by regularly updated content, is essential. A business’s website should also be designed to support multiple devices. Did you know two in five people will cease engaging with a site if it is unattractive? Did you also know that three in four consumers judge a company’s credibility based on site design?
To help convert a casual site visitor into an engaged user, you might also consider presenting relevant information in the form of an attractive infographic. Remember, your website is your marketing pitch: it should speak directly to the audience and succinctly convey what your business is about.
Be unique
Aping content that is widely available across the internet will not generate large amounts of site traffic. Rather, you should offer people unique content that demonstrates your company keeps its finger on the pulse when it comes to trends. Websites will not achieve higher page authority and domain authority if their content is not unique. As such, you should conduct research into credible, high-ranking websites.
Critically, your website needs to help distinguish your brand from your competitor’s. Because if your users don’t think your site is useful, unique, valuable or engaging then Google won’t think it either. And users will consider you as an average brand having a website like others. But you can stand out from the crowd by answering these questions, what do my users need on my site? How can I make something more well for my users? How my site is different from my competitors?
About the author
Nital Shah is the founding director at Octos Digital Marketing Agency. He is an expert in search strategies, planning and management with ten years under his belt and has served big corporate brands in Australia.
