How to Stay Connected with Your Customers in a Digital Marketplace
Digital marketplaces are well on their way to replacing brick-and-mortar malls as the mainstream avenue for consumers. COVID-19 has brought about changes in consumer behavior, which have accelerated digitization even further. 40 percent of consumers are now buying more online than they previously did. More than 25 percent of apparel searches now begin on Amazon.
Industry players across the board are seriously considering if and how they should participate in digital marketplaces. Their approach is important, because in such a cluttered marketplace, their competitive strategy can define their future. It’s a misnomer that price rules on online stores. Consumers want quality and genuine utility. In fact, these attributes are more important than ever for them. Companies have to ensure that they’re able to highlight these attributes in their products when they’re showcased online.
Brand recall and recognition are key. According to Forbes, presenting a brand consistently across platforms can increase revenue by up to 23 percent. In order to build these relationships with the consumer digitally, brands have to adopt an omnichannel approach and even find new ways to connect with them. Here are some tips to stay connected with your customers digitally:
- Social Media Strategy
- Video Marketing
- Go Live!
- Update Your Website Experience
- Source Feedback
- Discounts and Giveaways
It’s been said ad nauseum how important social media is for consumer brands in this day and age. To be fair, most brands have taken this to heart and launched extensive digital campaigns. However, with so many of them, these campaigns often blend into one another to simply create a collective cacophony. It’s often difficult for people to differentiate between campaigns and evoke any sort of brand recall. Businesses have to work harder to create an impactful social media presence that personalizes the experience for their customers. Two-way interaction is key to this. Consumers should be able to discern your values and see an incentive to be loyal to you.
Leverage video for all it’s worth. People are much more likely to click on a post with an embedded video than are to click on one with a blog. This varies depending on the industry, of course. But by and large, long-form content is more useful to you for SEO and thought leadership purposes.
Companies are using videos for everything from product demos to advertisements, social media shorts, employee Q&As, explainers, and more. It’s part entertainment and part promotion. Engaging videos with rewatch value can give you multiple shots at earning a customer’s loyalty. Share-worthy videos have a chance of going viral and get you a ton of free publicity. Video demos are particularly effective on e-commerce stores to help the consumer understand your product better.
The future of digital customer communication is live. By some accounts, live streaming grew by 99 percent in 2020. Videos that are live tend to hold users’ attention 10-20 times longer on-demand content.
Videos are often paired with live chat solutions for an interactive experience. Customers want to have a say about what’s going on and share opinions with other viewers. It’s a great way to build a community experience that your customers want to be a part of. It’s the kind of thing that can grow to be self-sustaining as you see with brands like Apple.
Your website can do a lot to build a connection with your customers. Well-created websites can capture attention and generate leads for your business. User experience is vital when developing your website. This is a mix of design, copy, and navigation.
You should always aim to tell a story through your website. Eliminate wasteful navigation with an intuitive sitemap that leads people to exactly where they want to go. Create on-brand copy that is both educational and entertaining. If there is a catchphrase, tagline, or values that are key to your business, mix in frequent callbacks to them throughout your website. Optimize your website for voice search, while you’re at it to improve accessibility and convenience. In a digital marketplace, your website is your store, for all intents and purposes. Make sure it stands out from that of your competitors.
This is an incredibly underrated part of building customer relationships. Lots of brands simply neglect to do this or don’t do it in any meaningful way. This is particularly important in the age of COVID-19 where people want to know that you’re taking their concerns seriously.
In general, it’s a good idea to keep your customers in the loop on everything from product development to messaging and service delivery. Send out frequent surveys to ensure they’re comfortable and happy with your brand. CEO Q&As are another great option. It helps your customers connect directly with the top decision maker in your organization. Schedule them frequently at times accessible for your globally distributed customers to get a range of opinions in.
Promotional discounts are a fact of life when you’re running a consumer business. Buyers have come to expect it. The mistake many companies make is to look at discounts as a wasted expense. The fact is, promotions can often introduce your brand to newer customers, many of whom will stick with you if they like the experience. Think of giveaways and rebates as another marketing channel and try to measure the cost per acquisition (CPA) for each customer.
You can do this by correlating the date of a customer’s first purchase with their follow-on activity with your brand. If they first bought from you as part of a promotion and have since continued to buy your products, the discount offered to them the first time around is the cost you’ve paid to acquire them. Compare the customer lifetime value (CLV) for these ‘discount’ acquisitions to that for your other channels, such as paid media, affiliate, and organic.
It’s important to keep innovating and finding more exciting ways to connect with your audience. Augmented and virtual reality, for instance, has gained a lot of traction in recent years as a way to recreate in-person experiences for customers globally. Personalized messaging has been around for a while, but big data and AI have taken it to a new level, where customers can genuinely relate to the brand communication they receive. Combining technology with empathy can help companies build a real intimacy with their customers and establish loyalty even in a cutthroat marketplace.
