Quinn Black
Okay, you’ve built your online audience, now you have to figure out how to connect with them. Connecting with your online audience is a crucial part of the process of turning followers into customers. Knowing how to properly connect with your audience is the difference between marketing success and failure.
Brand voice.
Knowing your brand identity and voice, and staying true to that voice is crucial to creating content that will connect with your online audience. You want to speak directly to your target audience in order to reach them effectively.
Maintaining your brand voice over all of your content is how you create consistency and familiarity. Being authentic with your brand voice is also very important when trying to connect with your audience. Consumers can tell if you’re being genuine or not, and are far more likely to connect with something they view as being genuine. On social media especially there are so many types of content that people are being bombarded by every day, that your post has to stand out. The best way to accomplish this is by sticking to your brand voice.
If your brand is all about having fun, make sure you’re creating content that has a fun and positive tone if your brand is more serious make sure your content stays within a more matter-of-fact tone. You want your audience to connect with your brand and if your brand is confusing this won’t happen.
It is also important to remain aware of and sensitive to the current social climate, you don’t want to appear as insensitive or unaware.
Be an expert.
Consumers connect with things they trust, and they trust because you are an expert. Showing your target audience that you are legitimate and fully understand what you’re talking about is a critical part of forming a connection. If you are a reliable source of information, especially on social media, your audience will be faster to trust you and in turn, are more likely to want to purchase your products or services.
When a company is lying or is misinformed it creates doubt in the consumer’s mind and makes them start to question or even dismiss that company altogether. If a news outlet got their facts wrong would you still watch their channel? If a tech company posted incorrect directions to charge their device, would you still buy their products? Probably not, that’s because we expect companies to be experts in what they do.
Engage.
Interacting with your online audience is another important aspect of creating a connection. Responding to comments, liking, and re-tweeting are great ways to directly connect with your audience. They want to know that your not a robot, by engaging organically with your online audience over social media you can form a direct connection with them. This also helps to increase your authenticity and legitimacy. Engaging on social media also increases your exposure and can help you reach more people. When you engage with your audience all of their followers are able to see that, thus giving you exposure to a whole new audience.
Utilize analytics.
Analytics are extremely useful especially to show you what your target audience is engaging with the most. There are many forms of analytics you have at your disposal, use them. Many platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google, give you access to your analytics on their platforms.
If you know what your audience is engaging with you can make informed decisions about the types of content you should create that will make the biggest impact and connect the best with your audience.
If your audience is engaging the most with posts that have videos, creating more content using videos will increase your engagement rates and allow you to connect more effectively. Analytics are also important to have when creating content for ads that you will be paying for.
When you pay for a Facebook ad you want to make sure your money will be well spent. Use analytics to create content that you know your online audience will engage with to get the best return on your investment. Learn more about how to use FaceBook analytics here.
