How Small Businesses Can Leverage Communication Tools To Engage Customers

Are you a small business struggling to grow your audience and extend your customer base? 

Then you’re not alone. For small to mid-size businesses (SMBs), it often seems impossible to invest enough time and resources to supercharge their audience growth. 

However, that may not be necessary. 

Rather than fixating on audience growth, focus on engagement. A smaller base of highly engaged customers is often much more lucrative for SMBs than a massive audience with low engagement scores. 

To cultivate engagement, however, you need to level up your customers’ communication experience. And for that, you need the right tools. 

Here are five essential tools that small businesses can leverage to increase their customer engagement. 

Centralize Social Media Tasks

To begin with, you should consider investing in a social media management solution. 

Even for small businesses, maintaining a solid social media presence is indispensable in 2023. 

Being present across channels like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok will help you grow your audience. And the right social media management tool will help you engage them. 

Posting regularly, replying to comments, and monitoring your posts’ performance are all essential to audience engagement. But juggling all these tasks on several separate social media accounts can swallow up significant amounts of time. 

A social media management solution - many of which cost less than $30 per month - helps you centralize all these tasks. Instead of hopping between accounts, you’ll be able to manage all your social media and engage with your audience via one main platform. 

Improve Reachability On Phone Systems 

Next up, you need to carefully choose your business phone system. 

Wait. Isn’t a simple landline or cell phone enough? 

In 2023, it isn’t. 

Modern small business phone systems, many of them cloud-based, come with a wide range of functionalities that will help you keep your audience engaged.

For one thing, they typically include far more communication channels than simple voice calls. Video calls, live chat, messaging, and even email are often part of these systems. 

This is already a significant advantage, since customers now expect businesses to be reachable via a large variety of channels. 

In addition, many business phone systems now also come with a variety of additional functionalities to keep customers engaged and make your life easier. These include voice-to-text transcription, AI-based auto attendants, and integrations with a considerable number of other business apps. 

A Small Business CRM 

Another element to your small business setup to boost customer engagement should be a CRM - a customer relationship management system. 

Especially if your SMB is just starting out, you may think that you can easily keep track of all interactions with a customer. However, as time goes by and your customer base grows, this becomes untenable.

Investing in a CRM helps you systematically file all interactions with individual customers, providing a valuable data basis for personalization and ultimately increasing engagement. 

For instance, say one of your customers is having an issue with one of your products. They call in to ask for assistance. Your agent gives them some advice. That conversation is automatically transcribed by your phone system and stored in your CRM.

If the problem your customer is having persists, and they call again, your agent will be able to pull up the record of their past conversation, saving the customer from having to repeat themselves. 

Level Up Your Email Marketing Game

The next building block you need for your small business’ communication setup is a solid email marketing platform.

In 2023, your customers’ email inbox remains one of the most crucial paths towards engagement. In fact, at the end of last year, 77% of marketers reported an increase in email engagement over the preceding 12 months. 

The right email marketing platform will help you easily design visually appealing messages, and to analyze what type of content resonates with your audience. 

Plus, you’ll be able to implement personalization to increase individual customers’ engagement. From adding customers’ first names to your emails’ address lines, to sending bespoke offers on their birthdays. 

A Flexible CMS 

Finally, there is your content management system (CMS) to consider. 

Your website is your online home base. It’s your bedrock. And one of your most important tools to boost customer engagement. 

It is here that you’ll provide access to all your communication channels via your contacts page. Offer people to sign up for your email list. Link to your social media. And offer incentives to engage with you - from free online resources to a shot at participating in raffles and giveaways. 

Given all that, you need to carefully select a CMS that makes it easy to give your website visitors a seamless, easily navigable online experience.  

Conclusion 

Optimizing communication is key when it comes to engaging customers. With the tools above, you’ll be able to do just that. It’s time to level up your strategy and increase engagement rates among your small business’ customers.

 

Image sourced from Shutterstock

 

This post was authored by an external contributor and does not represent Benzinga's opinions and has not been edited for content. This content contains sponsored advertising content and is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.