Engaging Customers Through Content
Being able be engage with your customers with personalized & relevant content is the holy grail of customer engagement. So, in this post, we'll look at a few tactics that you can use to keep your customers coming back for more and like/share your content on social media.
Email Newsletters
This "push" technique plays an important role in building awareness and creating engagement. Frequency is (relatively) less important compared to your ability to create useful, relevant and personalized content. If you're never sent a newsletter, this is a good time to start. If you can't manage to send them monthly, try quarterly but no less frequent than that. Newsletters are a good way to keep your company and brand top-of-mind. You may not get someone to engage with the first email, but consistency, persistence and patience will pay off! Here's an example of our Fall Newsletter.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are the digital equivalent of an end-cap at your local grocer. They help you deliver a focused customer experience and present an opportunity to showcase your expertise around a specific topic, industry or technology. So, instead of this information buried deep inside your website you are creating special "end-caps" to generate awareness, interest, desire and leads. Read Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Landing Pages on AMEX OpenForum. I talk about the 7 elements of developing highly-successful landing pages. Although published several years ago, some of the principles still apply and hold true!
Blogs
Blogs are a great way not only to engage your customers & prospects but they also play a huge role in optimizing your site for SEO. Content that is relevant and continually updated rates better when it comes to SEO. But, even new content tends to have a "shelf" life. Its SEO weight diminishes over time so it's important to keep curating and creating new content to position yourself as an authority on the subject matter.
Whitepapers
A successful whitepaper establish authority and lends credibility to your brand by demonstrating your subject-matter expertise and revealing valuable insights on the topic. They are a great engagement tool but you also want to use them to generate leads. A whitepaper created with a research partner has the potential to generate many leads. So, the question is not binary - Whether you should give it away for free? Rather, consider writing a short summary of the whitepaper explaining the key takeaways. Then, once you've engaged a bit, ask for contact information in exchange for the full download. This has been scientifically proven to work more effectively by creating a step-by-step exchange - you give something to get something.
Social Media
Social media is an amplification channel - taking advantage of the network effect of your friends and professional contacts - to get scale. Now that you've invested the time and effort in curating or creating content, you want to make sure you get the most mileage out of it. You want people to be able to like and share your content on social media. The question is how often do you share something? Different platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) display engagement patterns, hence the tactics for sharing content on each will be different. Here's what we propose. Take this as a rough guide, not a textbook response.
Facebook — A few times but not too frequently, keep it "pinned" until the next one arrives. You may also consider boosting your post through some paid efforts. But, measure and decide.
Twitter — With the average number of Followers at 208, we are drinking information out of a firehose. We advocate that you Tweet several times a day over a few days, even weeks in order to get some air-time in someone's feed. Try varying the time of day, day of the week and also the content of the Tweet itself.
LinkedIn — Promoting your content (or update) 2-3 times over several days/weeks would be considered acceptable. People check their news feed at different times during the day. So, you want to make sure it achieves maximum reach. Just don't overdo it.
We don’t have much experience in other channels (Instagram, YouTube etc.) but if you do, we'd like to invite you to contribute to this post. And, we’d be happy to update it and give you proper attribution.