Investors now expect seamless and personalized engagement with brands across various channels. But what does that actually look like? And how can you ensure your firm is up to speed on how to engage with investors in 2024?
HubSpot 's State of Marketing 2024 report underscores the growing importance of channels like chatbots, messaging apps, video platforms, and social media in fostering strong customer relationships. Surprisingly, the report indicates that 55% of businesses predict chatbots will overtake search engines as the go-to source for answers by 2024. Furthermore, marketers are gearing up to significantly increase investments in short-form video content, with 56% of TikTok users expecting greater investment next year. With the rise of social selling, brands must adopt a modern, omnichannel engagement strategy to remain relevant. This article explores how to master these emerging channels for more effective marketing.
The Rise of Conversational Marketing
Chatbots powered by conversational AI are rapidly becoming a must-have technology for businesses. By leveraging natural language processing, chatbots can understand client inquiries and provide personalized responses, just like a human agent would. This conversational approach makes it easier for customers to find information and get assistance exactly when they need it.
Beyond customer service, chatbots offer numerous benefits for marketing teams. They can qualify leads, provide product recommendations, share educational content and capture investor data, - creating a seamless end-to-end experience. When integrated with back-ends like CRMs and knowledge bases, chatbots become even more powerful.
While chatbots excel at handling routine queries at scale, human teams remain crucial for more complex issues. By automating basic tasks with chatbots, service agents can focus on high-value interactions that truly need the human touch. Leading brands are utilizing this hybrid approach of combining AI and human capabilities for optimized customer engagement.
The Rise of In-Channel Resolution via Messaging
Customers increasingly prefer engaging with companies through direct messaging on platforms like social media direct messages (DMs). The State of Marketing report found 19% of social media users reported sending a direct message for customer service in 2023 - up a staggering 45% from the previous year. Gen Z and millennial consumers especially gravitate towards this convenience of in-channel resolution.
By meeting investors on their preferred messaging channels, brands can provide seamless service and support through the entire customer lifecycle. Whether it's handling pre-investment queries, offering guidance and education during the decision making process, or addressing concerns after an investment is made, messaging enables contextual, personalized conversations every step of the way.
To effectively harness messaging channels, brands need robust in-channel strategies supported by the right tools and teams. This includes using chatbots to triage high volumes of incoming messages 24/7, while seamlessly transitioning complex issues to live reps when needed. Conversations should carry over with full context, regardless of whether a customer interacts with a bot or human.
Additionally, messaging unlocks opportunities for proactive engagement. With customer consent, sales and marketing teams can share relevant updates, recommendations and offers directly through messaging in a highly targeted manner. Brands successfully leveraging messaging see uplifts in key metrics like customer satisfaction, response times and resolution rates.
Video - The Content King Continues Its Reign
While trends come and go, video marketing remains a tried-and-true channel for audience engagement. The explosive growth of platforms like YouTube and TikTok has only amplified video's stronghold. Short-form lo-fi video content in particular is a major focus area, with 56% of marketers on TikTok planning to increase investment.
It's no surprise why video is a consistent top performer. With audiences consuming more video than ever before across multiple devices, it has become the preferred medium for information, education and entertainment. Furthermore, video's dynamic audio-visual format lends itself well to capturing attention and leaving a lasting impression.
To capitalize on video's potential, brands need comprehensive strategies spanning channel selection, content formats, production, optimization and measurement. This could include longer-form videos like product demos hosted on YouTube, Instagram for beautifully edited brand footage, and snackable TikTok clips offering tips or behind-the-scenes glimpses. Repurposing existing video assets into short-form vertical videos can also be an effective, cost and time efficient approach.
The Power of Social Selling
HubSpot also revealed that 17% of social media users bought a product directly through social channels in 2023. This number is only expected to grow as social platforms continually evolve their sales capabilities. Recognizing this potential, 87% of social sellers stated social selling to be an effective strategy, with 59% making more sales via social in 2023 compared to 2022.
Social selling empowers businesses to leverage the immense reach, targeting capabilities, and built-in trust of social networks.
By sharing educational content, initiating conversations, and nurturing relationships transparently on public channels, marketing and sales teams can connect with their ideal investors in an authentic, non-intrusive manner. Social selling also enables greater personalization through access to deep profile data about investors' roles, interests and pain points.
As with any marketing or sales approach, having a structured social selling methodology is key. This includes optimizing social profiles, identifying and joining relevant communities, consistently sharing valuable content, directly engaging with prospects, and measuring performance metrics. Social selling works best as a top-of-funnel complement to other outreach channels in a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Bringing It All Together - An Omnichannel Engagement Strategy
While powerful individually, the true potential of chatbots, messaging, video and social selling lies in integrating them into a cohesive, omnichannel engagement approach. Customers expect seamless hand-offs as they transition between marketing channels, touchpoints and servicing teams.
By bridging these channels - for instance, using chatbots to schedule meetings booked through social selling efforts, or sharing relevant video content over messaging - brands create interconnected journeys tailored to each customer's needs and preferences. Rich user profiles consolidating data across every channel interaction further elevate personalization.
Of course, effectively orchestrating this modern engagement strategy requires robust technology stacks and processes. AI-powered engagement platforms, CRM integrations, analytics tools and governance frameworks are all essential components. Only then can disparate channels, content formats and teams operate in harmony to deliver outstanding customer experiences consistently.
Measuring Engagement Success
Regardless of the specific channels and tactics employed, measurement is vital for evaluating and optimizing engagement strategies. While metrics like message response rates, video view counts and social selling lead volumes are useful indicators, they only tell part of the story.
To truly gauge engagement effectiveness, businesses must also analyze metrics directly tied to business goals – such as customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, average order value from engaged audiences, customer churn and more. Engagement analytics should ultimately quantify tangible revenue contributions at every stage of the customer journey.
Furthermore, brands need the ability to test and iterate on engagement programs through methodologies like A/B testing and multivariate campaigns. AI and machine learning can unlock deeper audience insights to continually refine creative, targeting, channel mixes and delivery sequences for maximum resonance and returns.
Bottom Line
There's no denying that the nature of customer engagement is fundamentally shifting. Channels like chatbots, messaging apps, video platforms and social selling are quickly becoming mainstream for brands to drive awareness, nurture relationships and facilitate transactions.
By embracing these engagement channels through an integrated, AI-powered approach, companies can meet modern investors on their terms while reaping the benefits of increased sales, cost efficiencies and unshakable brand loyalty. However, engagement success requires more than just adopting technologies - it hinges on having cohesive strategies, the right talent, entrenched processes and a constant commitment to optimizing based on real-world data.
If your firm hasn't assessed its engagement model recently, now is the time. Audit your current capabilities, identify gaps, and develop a comprehensive roadmap for mastering engagement in 2024 and beyond. The competitive advantages for doing so are indisputable.
Not sure how to conduct your internal audit? Let’s chat. DM me here on LinkedIn or shoot me an email.
Related: The Power of Social Listening: How Asset Managers Can Leverage Data To Drive Business Growth