Faced with the diversity of existing brands and companies in the market, customers have a wide range of choices. So, how can you make a difference to win over and retain your target audience? By creating a strong connection, an attachment to your brand, a solid relationship! To communicate effectively, encourage interactions with your audience, and create engagement within your community, Trustt gives you 4 effective tips to include in your marketing strategy without delay:
Why Interact Regularly with Members of Your Community?
First, let’s look in more detail at the importance of generating interactions from members of your community around your brand or company:
Informed consumers no longer trust traditional brand advertisements and media;
- There are many competing brands with similar products;
- Simply being present on the Internet to sell products and services is not enough.
- To really make a difference, attract and retain consumers, it’s important to succeed in creating a genuine connection with members of your community.
By regularly interacting with your target audience on social networks, your website, or other platforms, you create a real relationship with your audience.
This proximity enhances your brand image, contributes to increasing your sales while helping internet users in their purchasing decisions and strengthening the ties you already have with your own customers.
Moreover, if your community is active on your social networks, your accounts will be perceived as active and dynamic by the platforms’ algorithms… Which boosts your organic search ranking and therefore your visibility.
An active account attracts subscribers. If your audience comments on your posts and/or shares them, you will appear in the news feeds of their respective communities.
Ultimately, by regularly interacting with your own community and creating a strong connection, you automatically increase your number of followers, engage your community, grow your community, and therefore your number of potential customers.
4 Ways to Interact with Members of Your Community:
Here’s how to effectively interact and create a connection with members of your audience:
1 – Show a More Human Side to Your Followers
In the digital age and with the multiplication of content streams on the web, consumers now want more authenticity and transparency from brands and companies.
To generate interest and create engagement among members of your community, you must therefore show a much more human and authentic face.
Your community wants to be heard, for brands to really take their needs into account, to be attentive and available to answer their questions.
So, to better interact with members of your community and appear more human, more authentic and accessible, don’t hesitate to share:
- Behind the scenes of your company;
- Your values, your vision;
- Your projects, your commitments;
- The stages of creating your products;
- Key moments;
- Your questions, your doubts…
These moments shared with naturalness and spontaneity will inevitably create a certain closeness, a connection between the members of your audience and your brand.
Once engaged in your brand’s universe, your target audience won’t hesitate to react to your posts and publications on social networks, whether on LinkedIn’s news feed or Instagram stories, for example.
In return, be inspiring and supportive to members of your audience. Help them in their daily lives, give them good advice, challenge them and push them to surpass themselves to become the best version of “themselves… Like a friend or family member!”
Of course, your content and shares should always remain consistent with your brand identity and be part of a well-defined global marketing strategy.
2 – Always Respond to Reviews and Comments from Your Audience
According to an IFOP study: customer reviews strongly influence the purchasing decisions of French consumers! For the majority of customers surveyed in this study, it’s even their primary criterion for choosing a brand.
These authentic and sincere customer comments and reviews are therefore valuable for your brand as they allow you to:
- Acquire new customers while retaining existing ones;
- Increase the awareness of your company and your brand image;
- Create a strong connection and trust with your customers by considering their feedback and implementing necessary improvements.
Maintaining dialogue with your customers about your products is therefore essential to boost your business.
When your followers leave reviews and comments on social media or under product pages on your website, they want to be heard and understood!
That’s why interacting with them by responding to each review – even negative ones – and published comments, to thank them and make them understand that their feedback is essential to building your brand and crucial for building your image, retaining them, and converting new prospects.
Respond in a personalized manner and, if possible, by adopting the same language style as them while remaining professional.
3. Value the Members of Your Audience
Another way to interact effectively with your community members and generate engagement from your followers is by sharing user-generated content (UGC).
So, don’t hesitate to highlight your community members by sharing their posts and stories on your social networks, as well as their content (reviews, photos, videos…) on your website pages and communication campaigns.
You can also capitalize on email marketing to relay high-value content and UGC from your community members (such as before-and-after photos demonstrating the effectiveness of one of your cosmetic products).
By interacting with your audience in this way, and by sharing your consumers’ posts on social networks, you create a real relationship with them, a strong and unique bond.
This practice is extremely powerful in showing them that they matter to you, that you’re interested in your community’s feedback, and that they contribute greatly to the success of your business.
Your community members appreciate the visibility you give them and are then even more inclined to share more content on social networks (reviews, photos, videos…) or on any other web platform like a blog.
In addition to creating a real connection with your audience, this strategy will have a real positive impact on your visibility, awareness, and sales. Your company has everything to gain from it!
4- Involve Your Community Members
One of the most effective ways to interact with your community members is to offer them the opportunity to participate in the creation of your products and the development of your brand.
Consumers want to be active participants in the life of brands…
That’s why you shouldn’t hesitate to ask for their opinion!
You can, for example:
- Create polls in stories on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook to ask them if they prefer one version of a product over another;
- Send questionnaires via email after a purchase to measure their satisfaction with your services;
- Set up an ambassador program on your website, then launch product campaigns. In exchange, they will give you their detailed feedback and reviews on their use.
It’s a win-win relationship that strengthens their sense of belonging to your community and allows you to develop an offer of products expected in the market, totally in line with the real needs of your target audience.
Trustt is a community management CRM that helps brands develop and engage their proprietary community through the implementation of an ambassador program on their website.
The objective: To demonstrate the effectiveness of products, but also:
- Strengthen and humanize the brand image,
- Build an Engaged Member Community,
- Improve Conversions for Your Online Store.
As you can understand, establishing a connection with your own community is crucial. Your audience and customers want to feel important and valued, and wish to be part of your brand’s life. By establishing regular dialogue with your community members, they feel heard, and will thus enjoy commenting on your posts, tagging friends, sharing your messages, and recommending your products… It’s your turn to act!
