Why #customerengagement is the new black (don't be Pepsi)

Customer service has always been of import to a brand, however in the world of social media marketing, customer engagement and users overall experience with your brand can be the difference between coming across like Kendall for Pepsi (cringe) and Duo from Duolingos Dua Lipa obssession (*iconic*).

In today's world, a brand's customer base is online, ALL THE TIME. And social media is a great way to foster and maintain valuable relationships with these customers; but the flipside is that when things go wrong, it all plays out in real time.

Brands need to be in touch with what it is their customers want. Lauren Paul for Forbes tells us that businesses need to

"provide an unbroken and highly relevant conversation across channels, responding to and even anticipating customers’ everevolving needs".

So while Pepsi no doubt meant well with their Kendall feature by attempting to bolster the Black Lives Matter movement, they seriously missed the mark with their audience, causing widespread offence.

CMW tells us that there were a few points in their creative journey at which Pepsi would have been well-advised to take a rain-check on the campaign, including:

• planning their content: right message, wrong time?

• choosing their tone: can you really make BLM funny??

• choosing their celebrity endorser: Kendall... blackfishing allegations... REALLY Pepsi???

Someone's losing a job.

How could such a ,misstep have been avoided?

Why, by proper customer engagement of course!

Sarah Lentz from Xperiencify tells us the first step to successful customer engagement in the social age is to implement a digital engagement strategty in line with what customers want; at the most basic level, the brand must consider:

• embracing social media (if you haven't already, just do it)

• personalising messaging & content (it's all about that emotional connection)

• analysing feedback from customers (this is kind of... the point...?)

• implementing strategy over multiple channels (remember when we taught you all about integration?)

Still confused?

Our friends over at Hubspot have broken customer engagement down even further, to the point where they have literally given y'all a step by step implementation strategy to follow!

1. Build a brand voice.

2. Share your brand voice online.

3. Personalize customer experiences.

4. Create content based on customer history.

5. Use social media contests.

6. Meet customers where they are.

7. Use relationship marketing.

Simples!

There really is no excuse in this day and age for a brand missing the mark with customer engagement, it's really just a matter of giving the customer what they want!