Katie Jansen is CMO at AppLovin, a leading marketing platform with powerful, integrated solutions that grow developers’ businesses.
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Last year’s lockdowns prompted brands to rethink how to improve engagement with customers. A survey revealed that 96% of enterprise leaders agree that the pandemic has increased a need for digital transformation with the common purpose of adding value to the lives of their audiences through products, services or content.
Depending on your brand and goals, improving engagement could mean:
• Creating a frictionless pathway for communication.
• Delivering strong content to customers.
• Providing a seamless experience from one digital touchpoint to another.
Here are four ways to optimize the quality of your B2B engagement.
1. Elevate your conversational marketing.
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It’s a mobile-first, fast-moving world, and people want their questions answered in real time. Brands recognize the importance of seizing the moment and engaging with customers as soon as it happens. One study found that real-time marketing improved audience engagement by 76% and increased reach and followers by 36%.
Implementing a chatbot on your website, for example, makes it easier for customers to reach someone and shows a sense of urgency to solve their challenges.
And tools like Slack offer a way for organizations to chat and respond to existing customers quickly and efficiently — it’s caused some brands to completely eliminate their email marketing.
2. Diversify educational content.
Virtual learning through digital events and webinars is here to stay. Live streaming content and videos can further customers’ knowledge about your respective industry while building and growing your audience. If you’ve only offered long-form educational videos, try breaking up the long-form content into shorter, quick series-style video clips.
At AppLovin, we regularly feature a video series called “Ask the Dev,” which highlights success stories from our partners and customers who use our solutions. It’s more than just talking about our solutions — it’s about customers sharing real-life stories of growth to educate, inform and inspire others.
In addition to “Ask the Dev,” we’ve expanded our educational videos to include bite-sized content to engage those who may not be interested in watching long-form videos.
The great part about diversifying content is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. For example, you may start with a high-performing blog and turn it into a three-minute YouTube video.
3. Consider micro-influencers.
If you want to try a more focused approach through thoughtful, authentic posts with a smaller, more engaged audience, consider a micro-influencer. These are influencers with a highly engaged audience of around 1,000 to 10,000 followers and because of that, may provide better value for brands that are keen on seeing clicks, impressions, likes and comments.
More brands are opting to partner with many micro-influencers instead of one well-known influencer because of its better ROI. A semi-famous influencer with 500,000-plus followers may be able to create one highly engaged post. Or you could choose to work with 10 to 20 influencers for around the same price but gain access to a variety of audiences and achieve higher engagement rates.
Here are a few examples of successful brand partnerships with micro-influencers:
• Spotify recruited 13 micro-influencers for a campaign to promote its Discover Weekly feature. The result? A new audience of 2 million and 28,998 likes and comments.
• Tech giant IBM used 1,000 of its own employees as its own version of micro-influencers for its #NewWaytoWork B2B campaign. They received 120 million impressions and 141,000 clicks.
• GoPro teamed up with Loki the Wolfdog to promote an Instagram meetup and received 87,245 likes on a single post.
Segment your audience.
You don’t need a micro-influencer to tap into a targeted, more engaged audience. Think about your brand’s products and services and segment a specific demographic. For example, our customers regularly receive product updates and relevant content through a monthly email.
Here are a few ways to segment your audience:
• Demographics: Age, gender, location.
• Email open rates: Separate those who opened versus those who did not, and target the engaged users for a specific campaign.
• Past purchases: Retarget customers who spent money in order to continue engagement.
4. Humanize your brand.
To elevate trust and improve engagement, brands should focus on putting faces to names. The best way to do this is by telling more in-depth and interesting stories about the people and culture of your organization.
Share behind-the-scenes stories and milestones from your teams that create specific products or services. For example, AppLovin’s studio, PeopleFun, recently turned 10 and opened a new office, so we shared this on our blog and on social media.
Here are more ways other brands have done this:
• Outdoor retail company MEC shares real photos of its employees’ outings and events on its About Us page.
• Translation management software Smartling created an Instagram campaign and sent a photographer on an adventure to cities like Berlin and Istanbul to capture the personal and professional lives of its translators.
Even small changes can make a big difference — go to the About Us page on your website and add a few sentences about each executive’s hobbies and interests.
From Good to Great Engagement
Higher quality engagement begins and ends with the customer. Think about engaging a customer at every stage of their journey to understanding your product or service.
Improving engagement could also mean increasing the speed at which your product is delivered or expanding the convenience factor for customers.
When you aim to meet your audience’s needs while demonstrating value, it may make their decision to stay engaged with your brand a lot easier and eliminate the need to look elsewhere.
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Author: Katie Jansen, Forbes Councils Member
