Effective Listening and Engaging For a Social Media Campaign
Are you interested in learning how to create a social media campaign? Looking for the latest social media marketing tactics? It is not terribly hard to accomplish these objectives. We’ll share with you how the most successful businesses use social media to grow business and brand loyalty.
Effective listening.
Here are the links to the other Social Media Campaign Secrets series articles:
Part 1 The Big Picture
Part 2 Targeting Customers
Part 4 Telling Stories
What does customer focus mean to your company? Do you have a passion for helping customers? Serving customers? Improving consumer engagement would be our choice. But there are lots of possible options, aren’t there? Especially with listening to and engaging customers.
Do you have an understanding of the secrets to building relationships? Especially the ones that are essential for a social commerce business? Here we define a social commerce business as the use of social engagement to personalize and energize the shopping experience. It provides a social context to shopping and is both a channel and way of doing business.
They should be a top priority, so read on.
What do you feel is the most important factor in establishing customer relationships? How you make customers feel is the most important factor …hands down in our opinion. Like making new friends. It is becoming the most important element of social commerce.
Related: Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success
Business is a people activity; people like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Ones with whom they have relationships are at the top of the desirable business option list. The stronger the relationships with your customers, the greater will be their trust and loyalty to your business. So it is very logical for businesses in establishing customer relationships.
Studies show time and again, that your best, most loyal customers are the aptest to tell their friends about your business, creating strong word-of-mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing is the most important element of any marketing campaign.
So how do we propose to build a world-class listening and engagement business?
The best businesses, regardless of the circumstances in which they operate, find a way to win. They understand a simple fact: businesses that engage their customers outperform those that do not.
Here is a kicker
A recent Gallup study has shown that customers who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer. Actively disengaged customers represent a 13% discount on the same measures.
Effective listening and engaging … pay attention
Here are 13 tips for your customer engagement strategy. They apply for one on one in-person or online engagement. Note that following these tips will yield a good customer experience. In most cases, you will have to go beyond this level to yield a great customer experience.
Consistent service
Consistency goes hand in hand with providing great service built on solid trust. Internal expectations lead to external results. From a business perspective, consistency applies to every aspect of who you are and what you do.
Importance Transparency
Transparency is another competency that should come naturally. Yet so many businesses have trouble coming to terms with what it really means.
Customers and clients are smart. They know when you’re being upfront or when they are told a mistruth. If honesty is the best policy, they’ll appreciate and admire you more when you admit to a mistake, rather than playing games or even worse, avoiding the topic altogether.
This would be crazy
Don’t try to hide or cover up your errors. Address the issue directly, explain how you will handle it, and share what steps are being taken to prevent the errors from occurring in the future.
People are real; they are not numbers or statistics. It is as simple as that. They are human and want to be treated as such. They dislike being treated as a number. And they prefer relationships that work best for them.
Be friendly and socialize your business. People do business with people, so make it personal. Customers should want to do business with you because of you and your employees. Make your customers feel at home. You may have a great location, cool displays, great value, etc. That’s all great, but if your people can’t make your customers feel welcome and appreciated, all of the other doesn’t matter so much.
Relevance is vital
People have many priorities and rarely enough time. So pay attention and don’t use their time with irrelevant messages and conversation. Engage them with only the messages and topics that are relevant to them.
Strictly avoid broadcast messaging.
Communicate effectively.
Communicate effectively
Effective communication is the cornerstone of any successful company. In today’s fast-paced business world, having a range of communication channels available such as phone, e-mail, instant messaging, fax, etc. is key to maximizing your ability to communicate effectively with customers.
The bottom line
People like to talk with and be around friendly people. In such situations, they share quite a bit about themselves. And it obviously makes sense they expect the same in kind.
Customer care
Assume you are the company owner. Not all owners or executives make great leaders, but the ones that are should be emulated.
Watch …
how they take pride in how they deal with customers and employees and then follow their lead.
Start with observations
Consider starting questions with this phrase: “I noticed that you …” What happens when you are forced to think about this is that you start to consider what you know about someone before you meet them based on where you are, what they look like or what you know about them already.
An example
One of the best conversations I had at an event recently was because I noticed that someone was using two different phones at the same time. Asking why led to an amazing conversation about time optimization and technology.
Interrupt with questions
Many people think good listening means always letting someone finish every thought and nodding along. Instead, active listening requires that you ask questions while you are listening. Sometimes this means interrupting – but this isn’t something to be afraid of.
Often the interruptions will lead to tangents that create more intersections for both the people in a conversation.
Seek stories instead of answers
There are questions that lead to answers, and then there are questions that lead to stories. Here’s one way you might start a story-seeking question, “What inspired you to …”
When people share stories, they go beyond feeling like they are being interrogated. They open up and they connect. The more stories you can hear, the more connection you’ll feel to everyone you speak to.
Friendly and social
Be friendly and socialize your business. People do business with people, so make it personal. Customers should want to do business with you because of you and your employees. Make your customers feel at home.
You may have a great location, cool displays, great value, etc. That’s all great, but if your people can’t make your customers feel welcome and appreciated, all of the other doesn’t matter so much.
All the time
Amazing companies don’t always deliver ‘Wow!’ type experiences, they are just better than average all of the time.
The Kicker
Consistently all of the time is the secret sauce.
Experience
People are always looking for memorable experiences in their lives. They tend to remember both the very best and the very worse experiences. They prefer those they treasure and will share with friends.
Attention to details
Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest impact. Figure out the details that your customers enjoy and make them a routine part of doing business with you. Be vigilant … always listening and learning.
Try and remember things customers tell you and then show them you listened. Trying new ideas. Put your social commerce business in motion by being adaptable.
Want to know the best part?
Here is a story that helps me with better customer engagement:
When my son was about two and a half, he developed a funny habit of walking around the house from time to time, chiming out, and “I’m here.”
Although this little boy was strongly connected to his family and his small class of school friends, he still had that need to express himself.
I’m here. I exist. I want to be seen, and heard. I want to be recognized.
And as human beings, we never quite lose that. We might get a little more sophisticated about how we say it, but ultimately we all want to let the world know:
I’m here.
If you intend to market something — to ask for someone’s hard-earned money and irreplaceable time — you must begin by seeing (and honoring) who they are. And clearly acknowledging their presence.
Now it’s up to you. Choose one customer service strategy to start with. Have a meeting around it. Discuss how to implement it. Then, do it and repeat the process, creating something good for your customers to talk about! Soon you will have a much stronger social commerce business.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success
Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements
