It’s Time to Rethink Your Digital Outreach Strategy

Is your digital outreach and customer loyalty dollar hitting its full potential? If you’re like most businesses, the answer is probably no. The reason why is simple: You’re not targeting the right people (and you might not even be aware of it).

Think about it this way: Would you rather have 100,000 followers who are only mildly interested in what you do, or 10,000 followers who are genuinely passionate about your brand?

The answer should be obvious and in reality, you may have both.

Then what’s the problem, you ask? Simply put, you can’t tell the 10,000 from the other 90,000 on current social advertising platforms. That means that when you try to target your outreach, you cannot filter by the single most important criteria for your business: Who are my brand’s raving fans?

The reality is that over 90% of your casual observers are unlikely to convert¹ into paying customers and they’re rarely even worth your time (let alone your customer loyalty and outreach budget).

Why? Because they’re not your target market. And if they’re not your target market, there’s no reason you should be spending to engage with them. Sooner or later, they will get tired of seeing your ads in their feed and they may actually end up unfollowing you. Then you’ll be back at square one, trying to combat churn and maintain a six-figure follower count.

Spending to appease a six-figure following can be a distraction from the portion of your following that matters most

It’s Time for a Change

As traditional social media marketing continues to underdeliver on the promise of high-tech, high-touch by offering opaque pay-to-play tools, we feel it’s time for a change. That change starts with identifying your true target market and concentrating your focus on them. Once you do that, you can increase customer lifetime value and ROI on your digital spend.

Here are a few tips to help you get started:

1. Find out who your most important followers are! The people who buy your limited edition products, the people who tell all of their friends about you, the people who buy the products you advertise because…well…you asked them to.
2. Once you know who those raving fans are, focus higher touch engagement toward them, whether it’s sending out exclusive discounts, opening heightened access to your team, offering unique limited products, or other higher touch engagement.
3. Find a place built specifically for your top 10% of followers to engage: Not every platform is created equal — some are better suited for certain purposes than others.
4. Avoid charging your ultra fans subscription fees because that will slowly turn them from your top supporters to mildly irked or indifferent at best. It is much better to meet your dedicated supporters where they want to be met by offering flexibility and low entry points that can grow over time.

There’s no denying that social media is an important part of any business’s marketing strategy — but too often, businesses focus on the wrong things (like focusing solely on building up their follower count at the expense of providing quality experiences where they count). Change your digital strategy by redefining your goals so that you can create a digital outreach strategy that actually works — one that helps you reach the followers that matter most to your business.

Cloutchain is a platform that helps brands find and retain their top fans. Get started today for free at cloutchain.io

¹ Average conversion rates across industries is 3.9% with wide channel digital outreach. See Katie Holmes, Average Conversion Rate by Industry and Marketing Source, Rune Analytics March 2021 (available at https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/insight/conversion-rate-by-industry/)