At the core of many successful business operations is going to be the simple idea of engagement. Now, if every business did engagement at the same level of passion and professionalism, the creativity and content would come to the top as priorities, but because the playing field is different with each type of personnel and within each industry, there are more factors to consider.

But regardless of those issues of imbalance, there are still at least five ways that you can always engage customers, including with SMS, video calling, online chat, event coordination, and organic and passive promotion styles.

SMS Engagement

Using SMS engagement is very much a win-win situation for all parties involved. It’s very casual, non-committal, and doesn’t put any kind of pressure on the client at the other end of the message receipt. On the other hand, from the business perspective, it’s absolutely the most efficient way to get troubleshooting requests in real-time or get pictures and other media from clients that allow an excellent understanding of the situation. This illustrates how to promote your business simply by having effective lines of digital opens.

FaceTime Using Video Calling

There’s no replacement for being able to talk about your business, brand, or service face to face with someone in a physical room, but the next closest thing would be to use a video calling service to do business. Instead of just reading words like in an email, or hearing a disembodied voice like in a phone call, a video chat is a great way to follow through with good body language practices (like smiling and using gestures!) along with the information from speech itself.

Online Chat Options

But what about people who are just browsing through your website, but want to connect to you in order to ask questions while they’re there? That’s when installing an online chat function becomes a great idea. And it might be you on the other side of this chat, if your business allows it, or you could potentially have 3rd party representatives that can handle larger volumes of folks.

Event Coordination

For another method of engagement, consider having yourself or another representative go to certain events, either that you throw yourself, or simply are going on in your area. If your brand deals with graphic design, go to an art gallery and talk to people. That way you know you already have a captive audience.

Organic and Passive Promotions

In terms of organic and passive promotions, that’s another realm entirely when it comes to engagement. In this method, you’ll essentially use product placement in media to bring attention to your brand, and it affects people subconsciously in a way that will give you further recognition (as opposed to your competitors) in the long run.

By Kar

Dr. Kar works in the interface of digital transformation and data science. Professionally a professor in one of the top B-Schools of Asia and an alumni of XLRI, he has extensive experience in teaching, training, consultancy and research in reputed institutes. He is a regular contributor of Business Fundas and a frequent author in research platforms. He is widely cited as a researcher. Note: The articles authored in this blog are his personal views and does not reflect that of his affiliations.