Here are some best practices to help engage audiences on both a digital landscape and a more traditional targeting format.
Adding new members is the lifeblood of survival within the club market. Engaging with customers on a digital front is crucial today. Let’s discuss some best practices to help engage audiences on both a digital landscape and a more traditional targeting format. Here’s an overview:
What is customer/member engagement?
It’s using your resources in a strategic and meaningful manner to engage with your members. Sounds simple, right? In a digital age, it’s challenging to remain a consistent and reliable resource for your customers. And relying on automated techniques can deter us from achieving a “personality” and bringing in that human element.
Creating actionable strategies and tactics.
Marketo’s 2017 State of Engagement Report said that 98% of marketers had customer engagement strategies. And 82% of marketers had a deep understanding of their audience. These are great numbers. But more than half of customers felt that brands could be doing a better job engaging with them. This lack of trust can steer customers away. With this in mind, here are four strategies to improve member engagement:
1. Create opportunities for direct member communication
2. Deliver personalized content
3. Use multi-channel marketing
4. Use and analyze data in forward-thinking ways
The digital age has given us the opportunity to target in incredible ways, but it’s important to remain consistent and be helpful to your customers. Here are some tactics for supporting the four strategies above:
• Social media
Social media allows for you and the member to engage in real time, promoting opportunities for direct communication. It also allows for you to engage with individual consumers, or deliver personalized content. By using multiple channels, you can deliver a consistent message and target many people.
• Advertisements
Advertisements are an excellent example of multi-channel marketing, and can be seen in both digital and print formats.
• Videos
Videos should be utilized in your multi-channel marketing approach as well. They are great for your auditory and visual senses and work wonderfully on social media, often pulling in great engagement rates. A statistic from A Medium Corporation states that 87% of online marketers use video. Videos are the perfect way to visually summarize information.
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is critical when analyzing data. Listen to your keywords. These are words and/or phrases customers are actually searching for. This may not be the first type of “engagement” tactic that comes to mind, but if you’re listening to your audience, you’re then able to tailor and create content around their interests. Tools like Moz and SemRush are great for gaining insight to what keywords customers are associating with your club and content, and also give you the ability to take a look into competitors’ data a bit.
• Infographics
Lastly, infographics help to engage new members in a trendy way, relating well to all of the strategies we previously identified. Did you know that as consumers we respond best to visuals? I found a great piece from Hubspot that said 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and that an infographic in particular is 30 times more effective than a text article. Can you believe that? If you’re looking for a tool to get started, Canva is great.
Respectfully,
Sean Carr
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