What’s the ‘Right’ Way to Incorporate Your Audience into Your Operations?
While you might have a strong understanding of the importance that your relationship with your audience has a business, you might not construct or cultivate that dynamic in the same way as other brands do. Some are going to want their customers to be more involved, for the interactions to be more of what people remember about the brand, while others are happy for the bridge between you to remain purely transactional.
The kind of route that you want to take here is going to partly depend on the kind of business that you’re running, but it will also depend on other factors, like the tone of voice you like to project and the nature of your marketing material.
Feedback as Function
It could be that you’re a business that’s interested in pushing the envelope – interested in delving into experimental areas that could potentially pay off in big ways. In that regard, you might then look to how integrating your customers and the feedback that they have to offer heavily into your operations could help you to adapt and design around what you learn about what works and what doesn’t. Games that are being developed and released in part in early access adopt this technique, before releasing properly down the road with player feedback taken into consideration.
However, that’s far from the only place that you can see this, and looking to cloud-native development might give you some idea of how you can go about taking advantage of this route. What is cloud native development? It refers to the concept of developing software or something similar that exists entirely in the cloud, lending you a great deal of versatility, flexibility, and security.
Co-Dependency
Another route that you could go in, and yet another page taken out of the book of game development tactics, could be to go about organising a kickstart. This might be to fund aspects of your business or projects that you have in mind, but there’s no doubt that it has a certain impact on the relationship you have with your customers – or in this case, your investors. Opening this up to the public and asking for the support of your audience is something that could potentially prove to be very successful, but it will suit some situations more than others, and there are numerous pros and cons to consider before you launch into this for every part of the business that you see fit.
That being said, one benefit to consider here if it all goes well, is that it could deepen the sense of connection that your audience feels towards you, putting a genuine effort towards supporting you and encouraging you to push forward with the projects that require funding – showing the passion and trust that they have for you and what you put out.
Official and Distant
However, it could be the case that you’re more interested in keeping things professional. Perhaps you feel as though you want your brand to be formal, and formality can be difficult to maintain when you find yourself wading more deeply into regular discussions and different types of interactions with a varied and shifting audience. This doesn’t mean that you have to be at all rude or cold, though, and you might find it easier to focus on improving your customer service when you can maintain a laser-tight focus on the goals that you want to hit and how you’re going to get there in the context of a handful of interaction types.
This might be an approach that is best adopted when you work in a line of work that involves conveying a lot of information to people who might not be as familiar with it as professionals would be. Being in banking, for example, means that you’re often going to be informing people who are coming to you for information about concepts and ideas that require some distillation without losing anything important. This is a difficult balance to strike, and it can mean that you have to strike an even finer balance of making your brand approachable and friendly, without losing the ability to convey what you need to.
A Social Media Native
On the other side of the coin, though, you have a plethora of different companies and brands that have made an image for themselves through the unique persona that they’ve carved out on social media. These interactions, when they go well, can provide a strong level of community engagement, and can be shared throughout the social media ecosystem to the point where people outside of the initial audience are becoming more interested in the brand just for these interactions alone.
However, making this happen through your own will can be more difficult than it seems due to how out of your hands this whole process can be. Developing an identity for your brand that will get people talking, in the same way, might also be difficult to pull off without being perceived as derivative, and that might mean that you have to focus instead on content that gets people talking without being too overtly controversial just for the sake of trying to draw attention to yourself.
As you can see, you have many options before you, and while you’ll likely have a good idea of what’s best for your brand, there’s no reason why you can’t take bits and pieces from different approaches to sculpt your ideal solution.
