Customer engagement is a sign of a healthy business. Engagements signify strong marketing campaigns and efficient brand management. Keeping your customers engaged results in returning customers and a steady stream of revenue.
One of the keys to customer engagement is relevance. How important are you to a customer’s daily routine? If your relevance is high, so will be your engagement. Like you, your customers spend time on what matters to them.
Let’s explore why, exactly, relevance is so important for customer engagement:
Convincing your customers why your brand is relevant to them is much easier than trying to win on price or “cool.” Offering flashy gadgets or cheap products won’t net you nearly as many customers as showing how you fit into their lives.
When your marketing campaigns demonstrate your relevance, they become less expensive and more effective. Your brand is filling a need instead of appealing to window shoppers who spare you a mere glance.
Think about the customers who engage with your brand. What drives them? For example, if your business provides baby safety gear, you’ll get a lot of engagement from concerned parents.
Once children grow out of the age range for your products, your company is no longer relevant to these parents. Thus, their engagement will drop or fade away entirely.
So how can you keep them engaged? By offering products that have value even as kids age, like cabinet locks. The same things that lock away household poisons can keep curious teens out of the liquor cabinet.
Sure, capitalizing on a trend will get you plenty of short-term engagements. But once the trend ends, those engagements are likely to dissipate as quickly as they arrived.
To establish a strong presence in your market, you need to transcend passing trends. Your products and services need to be more than fads. Otherwise, your customers will walk away as soon as you’re no longer relevant to them.
Don’t let yourself become so wrapped up in the past or present that you fail to plan for the future. The reason many brands of old are now defunct is that they didn’t change with the times. Instead of becoming nostalgic, they became obsolete.
When you’re relevant to your customers lives, they’ll stick with you. Your superfans will urge their friends and family to consider your brand for whatever needs of theirs you can fill.
These loyal brand ambassadors will also engage with your brand online. They’ll capitalize on promotions offered through social media and sign up for email updates. These customers are extremely valuable, representing 23% more revenue than more casual customers.
Some customers will engage with you purely out of convenience. Perhaps they scrolled by a targeted ad that happened to reach them at the right time, or they heard a commercial on the radio during their lunch break.
While these engagements are welcome, they aren’t nearly as sustainable as those driven by relevance. Instead of buying the first product they see on the shelf because it’s on sale, customers will actively seek out one offered by a relevant brand. This bond is much stronger than one grounded in convenience.
Athletic apparel brands are a great example. If a Nike wearer’s local shoe store doesn’t carry kicks with a swoosh, chances are they’ll go the extra mile to find one that does. A casual shoe shopper likely won’t.
If your product isn’t relevant to them, your customers won’t see you as anything special. Until then, you won’t be able to command a premium.
However your products or services are currently priced, demonstrating your relevance will allow you to charge more for them. Speak to your customers’ needs more effectively than your competitors, and they’ll spend more for sake of a better solution.
You can spend a lot of money trying to reach customers and spark engagement. Even the most clever marketing campaigns can fail if they’re not hitting the right spot. If you can increase your relevance, customers will flock to you on their own. Even better, they’ll bring their friends.
Image credit: Andrea Piacquadio; Pexels
