3 Infallible Ways to Better Connect with Your Audience in 2020

Fortunately, the digital economy has given a lot of options to both small and large businesses. These can be used to reach, engage, and ultimately sell to your customers. Let’s take a look at some tried and proven digital models that help marketers do this.

1. Personalization (to Induce Purchase Decisions)

Multiple studies have found that personalization of content and messaging greatly aids a customer’s purchase decision. In a survey by Evergage, over 300 marketing professionals agreed that personalization is extremely beneficial in enhancing brand-customer relationships, with 70% claiming that it had a strong impact.

The point of personalization is to make the user feel at home. We all have our favorite coffee shop (or bar!) where everybody knows our name. While it may not help a great deal to greet your user by name on the website, it doesn’t hurt either. It comes across like a friendly wave from someone you know – and that’s a good thing. 

What’s even better is to actually put the information you’ve gathered about your users to work. Take a leaf out of Amazon’s playbook to get your customer back on the shopping journey they left when they last visited your clients’ site.

Personalize the homepage to the user with content related to what they already viewed. This could be several things like related products on an e-commerce site, or a specific type of service or tool or software on a B2B landing page. It could even be a certain white paper or research study related to their area of interest on an informational website. 

The technology that enables this is widely available. For example, a solution like RichRelevance lets you use an AI-based algorithm to go beyond customer segments. Not only that, it can deliver personalized experiences to individuals in real-time.

This is “hyper-personalization.” It means you can get to know your customers better, understand their needs, and interact with them at different stages of the buyer funnel. All this without relying on fixed workflows.

2. Knowledge Commerce (to Influence with Content)

Personalization helps narrow down targeting to the individual level for retailers. But what about those who already deal with consumers on a personal and single-user basis?

I’m talking about professional service providers, freelancers, independent contractors, solo entrepreneurs, and even agencies that use account-based marketing.

For such businesses, knowledge has become the currency. It is safe to argue that every business is an online business today. We’ve moved from agriculture to the industrial age, and the modern marketplace is seeing a switch towards the knowledge economy.

Which is why online courses and educational content are becoming super popular. A study by Research and Markets predicts that the online learning market will be worth $325 billion by 2025.

No wonder platforms like Simplilearn are proving to be critical cogs. This is especially true in the training for new media and digital professions that are emerging every day. For example, Digital Marketing for CXOs course blends virtual classrooms, instructor-led live sessions, and enterprise dashboards. They do this to teach core marketing concepts, martech tools, and the customer journey to business heads.

Building on that are platforms like Kajabi. These platforms enable small-time entrepreneurs and domain experts to build a start-to-end sales workflow based on thought leadership. It provides readymade CMS-like tools for every sub-task. Tasks include building your website to designing industry-specific courses, running interactive marketing campaigns, and managing audience touchpoints. All this while providing consistent branding across various content formats.

For information-based brands mainly in the B2B sector, this is an effective way to connect with customers. You can do this by sharing first-party insights, expertise in your niche, and use cases and practical applications of your products.

3. Conversational Chatbots (to Engage Instantly)

Chatbots have changed the very nature of the brand-consumer conversation. From initial engagement to after-sales customer support, chatbots have automated every part of the business transaction. They do so not by ignoring human interaction, but by emulating it to perfection.

Contrary to popular belief, chatbots are one AI-based technology that even small businesses can use to engage their customers 24/7. It levels the playing field for these players by giving them data on what their customers want in real-time. This then allows the customer care team to be prepared with better solutions in less time.

Chatbots have been around for a while. Yet as NLP (natural language processing) becomes more experienced, brands can use it actually make engaging connections with customers. No longer is there a need for offering general FAQ answers. To tell the truth, this will likely need a fair amount of trial and error. The best way to reach a happy medium is to start with the exchange of data.

For example, Cleo is an intelligent chatbot designed to help people balance their budget in a fun and conversational way. The AI figures out how much you usually spend and how much you can afford to. Say you went out on Saturday; you can find out if you can go out on Sunday again by asking a simple question:

Over to You

Do you believe in engagement as a way to elicit reactions from your audience and lead them to conversion? Then these approaches will stand you in good stead. Using a combination of creative content, personalized delivery, and real-time interactions you can understand your customers. It will also give them solutions and services that will keep them coming back to you for more. Good luck!