Bombarded with upwards of 500K marketing messages each day (Fast Company), modern consumers have become masters at tuning brands out. Along with the ability to hold a perfectly cohesive conversation while watching TV and tweeting away, consumers seem to have evolved with digital times by developing the ability to look straight through your “native” ad.
To stand out and stay top-of-mind, marketers must update their strategies and tools to enable authentic communication and relevance in real-time. Here’s how you can create meaningful conversations that effectively drive customer acquisition and engagement.
Know Your Customers On a Deeper Level
Would you rather have a conversation with your best friend, or a total stranger? Personally, I would pick my best friend – she knows all about me and the things I like to talk about. Not surprisingly, this sentiment rings true when it comes to brand/consumer dialogues: 73% of consumers prefer to interact with brands that use personal information to make their experiences more relevant (Digital Trends).
How do you do that? By establishing a clear view of consumer identity. Social login gives consumers an easy way to register for and login to your site or mobile app using their existing social media identities. In turn, it gives brands the ability to request access to specific data points that will better inform their content marketing strategies, including users’ locations, relationships, favorite brands and hobbies.
With the ability to tie all consumer data and activity to a single user profile, businesses are able to create highly relevant, personalized messaging and experiences across channels and devices. Knowing your customers translates into more authentic consumer conversations that drive conversion and lifetime value.
Invest in Boosting User-generated Content
One of the biggest mistakes brands make when engaging consumers is being too loud. In fact, the most effective user conversations take place when your brand is seen and not heard! Marketers should strive to put themselves at the center of consumer discussion, but let their customers do the talking. Why? Millennials state that user-generated content is 20% more influential, 35% more memorable and 50% more trustworthy than other media (Social Times).
Create opportunities for consumers to provide feedback about your brand, product or content by providing conversation vehicles like comments or reviews. Not only does user-generated content drive conversion rates by building brand trust and product discovery, but it also improves SEO performance by putting your business into fresh, searchable terms that your customers actually use. Make sure this content is sharable across social networks to give awareness and referral traffic an extra boost.
In today’s over-crowded marketing landscape, it’s no longer enough to be the loudest, most eye-catching or ubiquitous brand. It’s the businesses that truly get to know their customers that will be heard and initiate the types of conversations that lead to conversion.