A few days ago, I had an opportunity to speak my mind on the subject of Online Engagement. It was an event organised by Cyngus Technologies, a company that helps turn business data into valuable insights for effective decision making.
I was tasked to share our input on the subject from a social media agency perspective. Normally my brag will take me no less than 2 hours or so, but this one I got to do it in less than 30 minutes. After sharing in general the entire ecosystem of digital marketing and what it is all about, I began to zoom into the Online Engagement. I had to share all the grandmother story of what digital marketing is all about first so that my audience could actually understand where is Online Engagement within that ecosystem and how it plays a very important part that contribute to the success of any digital marketing deployment initiatives.
After that, I quickly moved into the subject. Here are the list of 9 things majority of the brands out there tend to forget when they engage with their customers. Check out my slide presented below:
Be Human – Many websites are not meant for human visitors. They’re messy, too many font types, too many pop-ups, lots of advertisements and too technical. They do not intend to humanise their content anytime soon, yet they are puzzled why there are no visitors coming to their website. Social media wise, these brands failed to realise that human does want to interact with another human being. But they failed to reply to their customers’ comments and interactions as a human being. Instead, they let their brand name or company name to interact with the audience. I personally find it weird when a human being is interacting with a symbol or a brand and not another human being.
Website + Blog – Everybody wants to get audience or visitors to come to his or her website daily. Yet the website is static and boring. They do not know that by having a blog in there and keep it updated regularly can make their website interesting again. A dynamic website with interesting content in it can bring in more traffic and let them stay there longer.
Mobile – These brands do not aware that now their website aren’t searchable anymore. Why? Because they said, if it is not broken, don’t touch it. Without having a mobile-friendly website, Google is not going to index it up. When their website is not indexed, it will not be searchable anymore.
Listen – Many brands like yours prefer to create good contents, share it and interact with customers. That is it. You forget to listen what those people are talking about that relate pretty much on their brands. Or perhaps you just simply do not care or bother to know further about feedbacks. You don’t bother to listen to these conversations that happen among the audiences out there. These people are talking bad about your brand and you don’t even know about it. How interesting. If only you put an effort to listen to their conversations about your brand, maybe you can take note about those and rectify your offering accordingly.
Friends Are Forever – Brands out there forget one simple thing. They still think that they are capable of influencing their audience to buy. Wrong! The one that can really persuade and influence the audience to buy is their friends. When you buy that fancy car of yours last month, did you use a recommendation from the sales person or your uncle’s? Yes, we buy something out of a recommendation from someone we trust like friends and family members – not brands.
Trial – As a human being, we will believe something if we can visualise it, smell or touch it, and perhaps have experience it before. Good brands out there like IKEA for example, they simply want us to try out that nice-looking sofa and the softness of the king-size bed made. They want us to ‘steal’ the interior design ideas so that we can go back and visualise what we have experienced there and put the idea in place for our own house. Either we realise it or not, a week later, we were in IKEA buying stuffs we don’t even need.
Experience – People will say good things when their experience are well matched with their expectations. Good brands like Apple and Google for example, are enjoying huge support from their brand advocates who happen to love their products and services. They love them so much because they have enjoyed a good experience of using the products and services, which is exactly as per what they were expecting before hand. Not many brands out there understand this.
Call-To-Action – Too many companies out there own websites that share every single thing they do, except one thing. They simply forgot to direct their visitors to something before they leave their website. If the visitors do not wish to buy your stuffs there and then, at least direct them to subscribe to your newsletter.
Analytics – Many organisations out there thinks analytics tools are not important. They say this is a nice to have instead of a necessity. Let me tell you something. Your website generates data. Your social media generates data. Your contact centre generates data. All your online activities generate data. With analytics, you can gather these data and produce business insights in many forms – graphs, charts and colourful visualisations. From these, you will be able to see very clearly execution of strategies that are working fine, those that are not working, problematic areas and many more. In simpler word, analytics tool is like the MRI machine that scans through our body to pinpoint the problematic areas within our body. It helps to pinpoint the problems and reduce the troubleshooting time there and then.
Avoid these mistakes, and you will enjoy a greater engagement quality. A great engagement results will reward you and your company well financially.
