Creating a Personal Dialogue with Your Customers

A few months ago, I wrote a post asking "Does Social Media Marketing Work?" While it doesn't always, there are cases when it does work quite well provided you approach it as part of a vital brand strategy.

Your business can utilize Facebook, Twitter, and blogging to reach out and connect with customers and make them feel invested in your brand. You may think your products are getting better and your service is outstanding, but what if a large segment feels differently?

The public wants to know about your products and services, but more importantly, they want to get to know the personality and principles behind the company.

How to Make a Splash With Social Media

Conquering social media is all about developing a brand, and supporting it consistently. Your business must have a solid mission statement that is fully understood and represented company-wide. However, the mission and the values of the business should also be available to the overall public.

By pushing your unique brand to the public, people begin to naturally understand what qualities they can expect from your company. People become loyal to your brand because they feel they can trust you, and they feel connected to the people behind the brand.

So, how do you build this connection? By creating a personal dialogue with your public through the social media platforms mentioned before. This does not mean posting extremely personal information on your networking pages or blogs; you simply must be engaging and interested in what your customers have to say. There are very simple ways that you can keep the conversation going.

Simple Tips to Build Authentic Dialogue

One of the first things you want to do is avoid speaking in a technical or dry tone. Instead, you want to share content and speak in a more conversational way. Write more like the way you speak and avoid adding fluff and unnecessary information to your conversations. Buzzwords and jargon should also be avoided whenever possible.

The conversation is best when it flows from one person to the next before switching. Responding to comments and messages is a good way to ensure you have this available. You can also ask questions when you post content to get the ideas of those who follow your business's social media accounts.

Make sure that the content you create is relevant to the audience. Every business has one and each of them is unique. Use what you know about your audience to tailor your content and the way you speak. If you need more information about who your audience is, consider surveys, social listening, and other things of that nature.

Important Techniques to Create a Personal Dialogue

First, you must maintain an active web presence. If customers visit your blog or company page, and the latest update is weeks old, they are most likely going to leave. You clearly do not maintain this site, so it is not going to provide them with fresh and relevant information.

Internet audiences are quite fickle and restless. If you are going to keep the traffic flowing to your sites, you need to commit to posting new information every day, or at least every other day.

What you include in this information is just as important. Your posts and blogs should not be sales materials. They should be informative, useful, and helpful to your customers. You have to be willing to give in order to receive on social media. Also, you should encourage your audience’s participation.

In your posts, ask questions and respond to the answers. Have a call to action encouraging your readers to chime in. If your customers have been nice enough to take the time to leave a comment, they will greatly appreciate that you took the time to acknowledge that effort. By participating in discussions with your visitors, you can gain very useful feedback, while showing your customers that your business truly cares.

Final Thoughts

Customers want to know more about what you offer, whether services, products, or both. However, there’s more to their imagination than that. Showing your audience the principles behind the business and what kind of personalities are behind the scenes can have a huge positive impact on your success.

Social media is a must for businesses today and you likely already make use of it. What you might not realize is that these platforms are the perfect spot to create a dialogue with your customers. Use some of the tips above to make sure you’re giving potential and current customers what they want from you.