Edwin Schlosberg once said: The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. Social media community engagement? What does it mean to your business?
In the ever-changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media community engagement?
Here we define social media community engagement as the process of gaining customer website traffic, attention, and interaction with customers through social media sites.
Do you remember the last time you created an online relationship with a potential customer? We would love to hear the story. Please share it in the comments section below.
This task starts with what customers want and need. Most people want to: feel needed, be valued, be appreciated, be fulfilled, share emotions, laugh and be happy, succeed and be inspired.
Make them feel something that feels unique to what other brands are blasting at them. To do this, you must know who your community is. You must know how to catch and hold their attention.
So let’s examine our recommended game plan to build a positive social media community engagement:
Win the first impression battle
What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.
You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right.
Have patience and persistence. Slow down and do it right and at the end of the game, you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.
Social media community engagement … connect emotionally
Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on G+, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day, and I am replying to posts, I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond.
It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card.
Focus on relationships
The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard.
Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge.
Inspire them
Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire … Connect …Achieve. To do this, you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience, then you can know how you can help them be better.
How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners, and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.
Teach them
What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old, same old you wrote two years ago that is overused and oversold, by everyone everywhere.
Make it easy
People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.
The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen.
The bottom line
Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions. By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms, although few marketers have been able to exploit them as fully as they desire.
As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to go before they truly begin to unlock the potential of the social web.
Most marketers, in fact, use social media much as they would ordinary media—to broadcast messages. We are still not working as hard as we can on engagement and building relationships.
And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems.
While consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves their personal conversations, they appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships with others. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.
That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy. For a social strategy to succeed, simply joining the conversation is not enough. You must lead it.
Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips and you will be leading the way.
Do you have an experience on your team’s positive engagement to share with this community?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
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. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
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?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Network Connection … 23 Actionable Tips for Relationships
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Are you struggling with finding new areas of profitable growth? It may be some comfort to know you’re not alone. And time and again, we’ve seen organizations make the same mistakes when looking for those opportunities. Surprise, surprise! They are ignoring exploring retail innovation.
As a result, they tend to botch mergers and acquisitions. They search frantically for “blue oceans” of uncontested market space. What they should be doing, instead, is analyzing their core business for growth opportunities.
In the past, most retail innovations focused primarily on efficiency to mass-market opportunities. Ongoing innovations in technology improvements will continue to improve efficiency. But future retail innovations will be more customer-facing.
Retailers will address the unique needs and desires of individual consumers. They will provide a more rewarding and memorable shopping experience.
These companies will innovate around new formats and distribution models, products, and service offerings. Marketing and customer communications will continue to improve.
Subsequently, we have identified many innovation opportunity areas. These provide tremendous potential for creating new consumer benefits and stakeholder economic value.
Innovative retailers have a huge growth
opportunity
Ecommerce-first retail expansion is like testing your abilities at a $10 table before you muster the courage to lay some serious money down.
As a result, your online store can turn a potential all-in play into a simple check.
You might still stuff it up. It’s still challenging, uncertain, and slightly daunting. But you dramatically reduce the potential risk if everything goes belly-up.
The ‘fail-fast’ mentality lends itself to the global eCommerce question.
Nimble and assertive startups are widening their reach and diversifying their revenue streams. However, more conservative retail brands watch on from the sidelines.
Before online shopping, the retailer’s plunge into overseas
markets was fraught with danger.
You needed a whole bunch of expensive, time-consuming
accompaniments:
Better than anything – there’s no extreme pressure from costly overheads to make money immediately. If you launch your site, and demand is slow – you have the time to generate more awareness. Alternatively, you can abort your mission without a massive net loss.
The “what’s the worst that can happen?” attitude can be a positive
here.
Try a new market
If it fails, at least you gave it a burl.
If it succeeds, the growth potential exponentially outweighs your
loss.
Help me choose
More products, brands, retailers, and shopping formats are introduced to consumers every year. At the same time, technology has resulted in an explosion of information. This includes inaccurate and irrelevant information.
Consumers are faced with too many choices and information overload. And as well as more complex products and a lack of knowledgeable sales assistance. Therefore many consumers are struggling to make smart choices and are looking to retailers for help.
Catch a wave
Successful marketers ride the waves created by demographic, societal, economic, and technological trends. These “green space” opportunities represent emerging growth patterns in the market.
Exploring retail innovation.
Companies that apply innovative thinking to a growth market opportunity can generate even stronger growth and financial performance. New products, new services, new retail concepts as well as new business models maximize these trends.
Exploring retail innovation … solve my problem
Retail problem-solvers understand what the consumer is trying to accomplish by looking downstream at his or her ultimate goal. For example, innovative home improvement retailers understand that the consumer doesn’t want to buy a drill.
The consumer wants to make a hole in order to build a deck. Looking even further downstream, she/he wants to build a deck to entertain family and friends.
This consumer-centric approach results in opportunities to add value to the shopping experience by doing more for the consumer. Often, this requires adding services, information, and support to the product mix in order to provide a complete solution.
It may also mean offering additional product categories or adopting new approaches to marketing and merchandising, These reflect a better understanding of the shopper’s ultimate goal. In every case, it means getting away from a transaction mentality and focusing on customer relationships.
Retailers that have established relationships with customers have bonds of trust that create innovative opportunities to extend the relationship further.
Consumers have a fundamental desire to connect with one another, and technology is facilitating the exchange of ideas, information, and opinions. New types of social networks foster community among consumers who share a common passion or interest.
Do it for me.
Marketers can forge stronger relationships with these consumers and earn their patronage by helping them connect. These connections matter to them and help by responding to their emotional as well as their physical needs.
Exploring retail innovation … do it my way
Shopping is becoming increasingly individualistic. This is being driven by the growing diversity of the consumer marketplace, technology enablers, and the consumer’s desire for greater influence, control, and uniqueness.
In this new environment, the retail power structure has permanently shifted from sellers to buyers. Innovative retailers will look for ways to provide more unexpected gratification to shoppers. This lets them express themselves in unique ways. And what is more unique than “me”?
But, can marketers really seek out the desires of individual consumers and do only and exactly what each one needs or wants? For the most part, customizing each order to each demand point will remain outside the boundaries of economic feasibility. Instead, the goal will be better matching the market to the consumer.
The Internet enables this process by providing greater accessibility to more information and more options. This along with the ability to customize the shopping process to better meet shoppers’ specific needs.
Speed it up
Consumers value what is most scarce, and time is at the top of the list for many. They want it fast (speed up the shopping process). Consumers want it now (immediate gratification). They want it first (latest and greatest).
Exploring retail innovation … enhance the experience
As busy consumers turn to the Internet to satisfy more of their shopping needs, store retailers will focus more intently on providing better experiences. Experiences that can be gained only by being there. Individual retailers—even category killers—may not be able to own a merchandise category, but they can own a buying experience.
The decision to create a customer experience shifts the focus from what moves product to what moves people. Experiences are more than entertainment, education, or interaction; they engage customers in a memorable and meaningful way.
In The Experience Economy, authors Pine and Gilmore discuss the opportunity for companies to script and stage experiences. Those that create value that exceeds the value of the goods and services used to create the experience.
The authors urge companies to look beyond traditional pricing factors like time and cost and consider charging for the value of the experience.
Goods and services say, Pine and Gilmore, are no longer enough. Experiences are the basis for future economic growth.
Make it easy
Ease-of-use is vital to the success of the retail shopping experience. The innovative process, service, and design solutions that are simple, intuitive, and in tune with shoppers’ needs. These solutions—along with new technology tools— can save consumers time and effort.
Easier and more rewarding customer experience will boost sales and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Exploring retail innovation … do it for me
Another way to solve my problem is to do it for me.
Demographic shifts and lifestyle changes—along with growing product complexity—are steadily driving former DIY consumers into the do-it-for-me (DIFM) market. This market can be for everything from home improvement and automobile maintenance to cooking and cleaning.
Retailers are responding to consumers’ increasing do-it-for-me demands with innovative new services and conveniences.
Come to me
In the old days, consumers made the pilgrimage downtown from miles around in order to shop. Then malls were created, and shoppers flocked to these huge centers as the main shopping hub.
More recently, many retailers have been moving into neighborhoods to be closer to where their customers live. What’s next? In my home, in my car, at my workplace.
New distribution models are springing up as retailers take the show on the road and reach out to consumers wherever they are.
Emerging markets present the best long term
opportunity
You need to do some solid research before you dive right into international waters.
Analyze the demand and competition in any potential new market. You might even like to run a pilot or beta program to test a few key products before you commit significant investment.
It’s critical you find the right nation/s to ensure success. The obviously established markets in North America and Europe might not be the best strategic options.
Here’s some super valuable advice from Bigcommerce:
“Online shoppers from smaller countries are probably more likely to make international purchases, and they’ll likely spend in larger international markets like the U.S., Canada, and Australia.”
While the dollars and demand might exist in the US, UK, and Canada – these markets are the high rollers.
It’s a tough room.
You might find it a little intimidating taking on the Amazon/eBay/Asos of your industry.
(If Amazon played poker, I imagine this is what he or she would
look like.)
It will be harder to muscle in from a low base. Generating
awareness and acquiring customers could be challenging,
and costly (of course, the glass-half-full retailer knows a larger market means
you need a smaller slice of the pie).
In contrast, it may be easier to establish traction in less
established online retail markets (particularly those isolated nations poorly
serviced by global powerhouses).
Places like New Zealand, Scandinavia, South Africa have developed markets, with a high proportion of people conditioned to buying online.
Newer emerging markets like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia present more of a cultural and logistic challenge, but the growth potential is enormous, and the competition is underdeveloped.
If you play your cards right at these new tablets, the payoff could be enormous.
If you take on the heavyweights high rollers, things could be a
whole lot more difficult.
The truth is that there is no one truth to innovation. Not IBM, Google nor Amazon has hit on the “right” way to innovate, but they have found the right way for them. It is how those practices have become so deeply embedded into the fabric of their organizations over time that makes the difference.
If you want to innovate, you need to find your own path.
E-commerce has certainly revolutionized the way we shop, but brick-and-mortar stores are far from dead.
Increasingly, online retailers have begun opening physical stores for the first time, which signals that there may be a return to real-world shopping – only this time, reinvented for the digital age.
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 continually improving your business learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning 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 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 continuous learning from Digital Spark
Marketing’s Library:
Talking to or performing in front of crowds is a real art, isn’t it? Bands do it. Magicians do it. Politicians and inspirational speakers do it. They personalize their performances and their messages for excellent customer engagement.
When politicians enter a crowded auditorium, and as they walk down the aisle they stop to warmly shake hands with a few people on the aisle and shares a few friendly words with each.
The lead singer in a band bounds onto the stage of a packed arena, punching the air with energy. He pauses at the stage edge as if he’s caught someone’s eye in the crowd. He smiles broadly, points and waves at what appears to be a fan he’s spotted. He then calls out to the whole city all the time maintaining a pointed finger to his “friend” in the crowd.
Related: What Little Things Small Businesses Can Do To Build Customer Relationships
So remember this. Once you stop treating the crowd like a crowd and start focusing on individuals, people notice. The more you do it, the more everyone engages.
One by one, the experience and expectation in the crowd is that this isn’t just one of many things. It’s about the performer and me, a unique, unrepeatable, magic moment shared. Even people who don’t get individually called out still start to believe this.
Multi-channel communications need to focus on customer journeys and customer-centric communications. It is all about the imperative of getting into the crowd, waving and smiling and connecting with our customers where they are.
Quite simply, we are moving to a customer-centric marketing approach.
So here are ten building blocks for even better customer engagement and customer-centric marketing:
Make changes
… based on your insights.
Do the right thing.
Do the right thing
… even if it adds costs. Dealing with people means that you will have to take the good with the bad. The patience to deal with all types of customers is vital.
Exercise
… occasional random acts of kindness.
Be social
… offer smiles and friendly words. When dealing with the public, things can go wrong. You have to be flexible enough to roll with the punches and think outside the box sometimes. And be social at all costs.
Demonstrate
… that you listen, hear, and most of all, remember.
Pay attention
… while you listen and observe.
Make it easy
Make it easy.
… for customers to do business with you. Keep in mind that time is the most valuable resource for most customers. Being able to look at a situation through the eyes of a customer is an extremely valuable skill that can enable you to provide the highest degree of service.
Personalize
… your services as much as you can.
Be proactive
… take the initiative for as many actions as possible. It’s never a good idea to wait until a customer is stressed or agitated before offering assistance. Being one step ahead to gauge when someone needs help is the best way to minimize a brewing situation.
Customers don’t want to deal with sales associates who have to force themselves to be pleasant and nice.
A great example
JetBlue recently launched a brilliant new ad campaign called “Air on the Side of Humanity.” Have you seen it? You might want to check it out.
They ingeniously use pigeons as a transposed metaphor for frequent flyers who are challenged by business travel and crowded flights. I can relate. The spot shows crowded skies full of pigeons while an off-camera narrator says “the reality of flying is not very pretty.” It’s a royal headache and a major inconvenience.
They show crowded jostled pigeons on a building ledge lined up single file facing the camera while the narrator says, “They pack you in there, you hardly have any space for yourself. Hey, I’m a big guy, and I need some room to breathe”. As the narrator continues talking about the future situation being bleak the camera focuses on a man’s legs sitting on a park bench throwing crumbs to pigeons on the sidewalk as the narrator says, “They throw you crumbs and act as if it’s a five-course meal.”
Next, they show a lonely pigeon on a busy pedestrian sidewalk as people walk around ignoring a confused bird as the narrator says, “I feel completely ignored.” Then the narrator asks the question, “There’s gotta be a way to fly with a little respect, you know?”
Then they cut to a different voiceover announcer who says, “Enjoy JetBlue’s award-winning service, free unlimited snacks and the most legroom in coach.” An awesome way to engage customers, isn’t it?
What I love about this engagement approach is that it takes a customer experience perspective that no doubt was derived from deep customer insights. As a frequent flyer myself I was able to relate to the spot on multiple levels. I can just imagine what the creative brainstorming session must’ve looked like.
It probably went something like this… Let’s find a metaphor for flying … pigeons. Put them in crowded lines and jostled frustrating situation … crowded skies of birds flapping their wings. Demonstrate the food is not very good … throw some crumbs. And show how nobody cares about the passenger … show bird on a crowded sidewalk alone being ignored.
Then ask the question, there has to be a better way, and the answer from JetBlue is … Air on the side of humanity! Simple and easy. And brilliant.
Do you have a lesson about making your customer engagement better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer engagement from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Whole Foods Customer Engagement Using Social Media
Is Employee Engagement the Backbone of the Publix Culture?
13 Employee Engagement Lessons From Best Employee Brands
Positive Attitude Is Everything for Customer Engagement
Mike Schoultz likes to write about the topics that lead to small business success. He also likes to share his many business experiences. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
