From the earliest touchpoints in your marketing—whether in person, by telephone, through website visits, or via social media—your company is creating expectations and establishing brand parameters. Managed properly, those factors can attract the right customers to your business and establish a platform for cultivating strong relationships and long-term loyalty.

The keys to maximizing engagement include:

• Choosing the right social media for the right targets. Plan your social media campaigns judiciously: rather than boil the ocean, use the right vehicle to reach your core audience. Metrics can help provide the information you need to identify the social media opportunities best suited to connecting with your strongest prospects. Make sure you’re fully informed about the ad programs available through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc., but don’t neglect opportunities for earned media.
• Map the customer experience. What do customers need from your company? To answer that question accurately and profitably, you need to listen before you pitch specific products, services, or solutions. This is essential because it ensures that you and the customer understand one another and are on the same page about what your company can and cannot accomplish. Having that understanding in place sets the stage for your team to begin a relationship with a customer who is delighted rather than disappointed or dismayed by your service. Your products and solutions—and for that matter, your individual employees’ conduct—cannot fall short of the standard captured in your marketing message.
• Use the technology at your disposal. What is the experience of a customer who has to contact a member of the staff about a billing error? Fulfillment status? The whereabouts of a package that your system says was delivered but never arrived? Is your organization tracking sales to identify additional opportunities to do business with each client, or are you keeping data in silos that prevent the company from taking action that could increase each customer’s revenue potential? CRM (customer relationship management) solutions can help answer those questions profitably. And many analytics packages (Google’s and Adobe’s among them) also support customer-service goals with customizable features that are underutilized.

This approach can prime your company to use marketing and technology to bolster both brand engagement and establish customer expectations from the outset. It transforms marketing into a relationship tool rather than a means of initiating transactions or announcing promotions.

Read the Connections to Growth: Turning Outreach into Revenue guide to learn how your marketing efforts can spur brand engagement and build loyalty