Marketing Research Drives Customer Engagement in Social Media

Social media marketing is no longer a trend – it’s a fact of marketing life and one of the most effective marketing tools to come along in years. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter enable customer engagement in a way and at a level that most companies haven’t imagined in their wildest dreams – and as any market research company will tell you, customer engagement is the cornerstone of customer loyalty. While most companies are still struggling to find effective ways to use these new platforms, others have launched campaigns that gained them customers, increased their profits and sent customer loyalty ratings skyrocketing. The difference, in most cases, is the quality of the marketing research done before launching their campaigns.
If any industry has embraced social media marketing to drive customer engagement and customer loyalty, it’s the coffee industry. Coffee giants Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters all boast Facebook pages with 27 million, 5 million and 500,000 Likes respectively. A deeper look at the statistics, though, suggests that the numbers really don’t tell the story about customer engagement.
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters based its social media strategy on marketing research. Before mounting its social media campaign, the company employed customer satisfaction surveys, marketing surveys and online research tied to its retail coffee website to determine what would get – and keep – its customers talking. The results speak for themselves. An engaged customer is a loyal customer, but engaging your customers isn’t always as easy as you’d think. A good marketing research company will work with you to identify your customers’ priorities, evaluate customer satisfaction and provide you with the information you need to drive customer engagement.
And once you get your customers engaged and talking with you, they’ll talk about you to everyone they know. That’s what customer loyalty is all about.
 
In what ways do you engage your customers or people overall?