5 Top Strategies to Connect with Your Audience

Brands can get their start an online from anywhere in the world. Their audience, client base, and even employees can be on the massive worldwide stage. They could be catering to billions of people, if their product applies to enough people. You can get your start online and follow your dream. Before that dream can be actualized, however, you need to have an audience. You need to have a community of people who know your brand, trust your brand, and, most importantly, have a relationship with your brand. You can spend all the money in the world in a mad-scramble to get new customers with very little of that traffic translating into sales.

Here are the 5 top strategies when it comes to nurturing and developing a relationship with your audience:

Narrow and Direct your Audience

With Big Data, you have no excuse to be directing your marketing efforts towards people who will not be interested in your brand. Not only is advertising to people who would not be interested costly, but it also hurts your brand image. If you take the time to truly narrow down who your audience is, and instead focus on building your relationship with a few rather than many, you will have created a company that people can trust in.

Connect with Stories

Stories are what connect us. Underestimating the power of a story and storytelling is to completely forget how we as a species communicate. How we evolved. Humans see stories, create narratives, and structure our world around plotlines to cast meaning to an often-chaotic world.

Narratives are the driving force behind the success of brands on websites like Kickstarter. They are the reason people will donate their money after a tragedy. Stories are how we define our existence. How we connect. How we empathize. So, how do you capture someone’s attention long enough to tell your story in today’s attention economy? You use clever marketing. Videos get more engagement than any other post.

A great video, however, is hard to create. That is why you want to use an instructional video production company that will tell your story in compelling visuals that stand out from the rest.

Engage, Engage, Engage

No, this doesn’t mean spam them. It means responding to messages promptly. It means actively searching for near ways to provide value to your customers. It means placing the customer’s needs first. With social media, people have more ways to directly contact you than ever before. With social media, other customers and potential customers will be able to view for themselves how you communicate and deal with their problems.

Have a clear, concise persona that your brand operates behind. No matter who is talking and helping your customers, you want them to feel like it is the same helpful, valuable voice. Treat every question, comment, and especially concern as an opportunity to both help that one customer, and to also advertise your competence to others.

Be Upfront and Honest

Gone are the days where companies can quietly brush things under the rug and deal with them through extensive PR strategies. We are in the world of social media. You have multiple channels that you must manage, and a world full of Internet users who are jumping at the bit to find fault with your actions. People are, however, understanding, but only when you are upfront about your mistakes. Being genuine and honest can go a long way, especially for new, smaller brands.

Use Influencers

People use brands they trust. They use new brands that those they trust introduce to them. When you are marketing, try finding influencers on social media channels whose audience matches with who you are trying to sell to. Be careful though! It is very easy to buy engagement, and you want to have a genuine, real person that will vouch for you, not a bot. Look for old accounts with dedicated fan bases. These influencers will typically have accounts on many channels, with the same fans on all of them.

The best influencers are the ones that will advertise your product, brand, or service as a review. They are the ones that will always be upfront and honest with their audience, regardless whether the post is sponsored or not. You want your potential customers to trust in the influencer, so that they will, in turn, trust you.

Building relationships have never been more important than it is today. So many brands exist solely on the Internet, which means that not only do they have to grow an audience from scratch, they also must prove themselves. It is just as easy to start a company online as it is to start a scam service. People are wary and untrusting of brands they don’t know and don’t use. That is why you want to build good, strong relationships with your audience. You want to be trusted.