I recently wrote about reviewing your customer journey, making each step of the buying process easy and trustworthy, but also the wider journey that customers take as part of your audience in interacting with your brand and getting repeat orders.
To do this, engaging or nurturing your audience will help you build trust and loyal customers.
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- You must think about your audience – what do they want? what are their needs?
- You must think about your position or your brand too – how are you presenting yourself to your audience? what is your unique selling point?
These things will help guide you when it comes to creating a content or engagement strategy.
Using content to engage with your ideal customers
Engagement can be as simple as talking to your existing customers, or using local forums and groups to engage with people. Creating content also provides a way to engage and nurture your audience over time. It doesn’t have to be daunting though.
Generally, content has the following purposes:
- to entertain
- to educate
- to inspire
- to engage
Whether it’s product shots, short videos of your recipes, long-form video of your process, memes, baking tips or something else; choose a type of content that will reflect you and your brand and connect with your audience. Some experimentation may be required to find out what works best.
Channels
There are so many different channels to engage your audience with content, both previous customers and yet-to-be customers. It’s not just social media, although social media provides an excellent opportunity to reach new audiences.
Email marketing is a way you can engage a specific list of people and write about your new products, your journey, your recipes, tools and tips you like, and things you are trying.
Using your website – you could use a blog or provide a free recipe.
Direct mail can be a little costly, but it still works today.
Partnering and collaboration to create content together and distribute it to shared audiences. A win for both of you.
There are forum sites, groups, and many other places where you could connect and regularly engage with your audience.
Putting the pieces together
- Remember you probably don’t have time to do everything, so you need to be strategic.
- Double down on a channel or content type that works well.
- Be consistent about engaging with your audience. The aim is to be top-of-mind for when people are looking for gifts or treats. Consistency will help build trust and loyalty and keep people engaged in your business journey and products to make repeat orders.
- Experiment and refine your marketing efforts and engagement strategies to see what works best for your business.
- Don’t forget your purpose or who your ideal customer is. You want people to know you sell baked goods – so posting random memes every day might not be the best way to connect with the right audience.
- Be creative. You don’t need to be original but coming up with a new cool way of promoting your products, or reaching a new audience can help you stand out from the rest.
