3 Social Media proactive customer engagement tips for the EURO2016 games!

Score a European Championships hat-trick: three social media tips to engage more customers

Football fever is set to sweep CCA International offices across Europe over the next few weeks as our top international teams do battle in the European Championships. From Marcus Rashford and Gareth Bale to Olivier Giroud and Xherdan Shaqiri, there are a number of exciting attacking players who could light up the tournament by scoring a hat-trick for their country.

The excitement is not just on a personal level of course: the tournament also represents an opportunity for brands – especially those in the FMCG and Retail space – to boost customer interaction by engaging with existing and potential customers through social media channels. Here are three steps brands can follow to score a hat-trick of their very own to provide a new generation of customer interaction:

Build and amplify brand-love before the event – As a brand, it’s important to get started before the main event kicks off. Just as a footballer wouldn’t get off the team bus and start playing straight away (there’s the small matter of a warm-up first), brands need to give themselves a rolling start.

A good starting point to drive social media engagement is to pick a hashtag which is short and easy to use, helping to pull the right community of people together. This can then be put to use by stimulating pre-event conversation with a promotional giveaway, such as asking who wears the shirt the best and why (for example, the England kit has to be represented best by Sturridge with his celebratory dance), or which footballer they would like to star in a future drink advert, and why. Consumers will come away from these early interactions with a greater sense of ownership, more commitment to the games and are likely to invite more people to participate with the brand’s activity during the tournament.

2)Stimulate engagement – Once the action kicks off, brands need to stay on the ball as they jostle for attention. By keeping up with play, monitoring and engaging in conversation related to what’s happening on the pitch, they will be able to identify and leverage positive content opportunities. For instance, this represents the perfect opportunity for retailers and sports brands to encourage customers to share images of themselves wearing their country’s colours, while FMCG brands can encourage fans to snap themselves enjoying their food and drink while wearing the country colours. The best images can be shared with the community to stimulate engagement and build awareness, serving as an opportunity to discover brand perception and manage the resulting sentiment.

From a brand’s perspective, this can also provide social media advertisement – for instance a sports retail brand could post a picture of a pair of football boots and ask followers to identify which sports star is wearing them. Those correctly answering could be rewarded with a small discount code and a link to the product on the website; brands can even take a step forward by gathering the winners’ home details via DM on Twitter and sending the reward through the post or using real-time location services to direct them to a nearby store to collect the item. Consumers should emerge with an enhanced experience and samples of products they find desirable and have an interest in.

Sustain post-match buzz – Once the final whistle has blown, the time for talking is not over and the customer journey must not be allowed to come to a halt. During the post-match period brands must seamlessly move into an analytical period, for example through hosting a Q&A online session dissecting how well the game went and who scored; potentially a fizzy drinks brand could host a poll asking who was the bubbliest player in the game, sharing free samples where appropriate. They could then extend this into longer form content such as a post-game podcast or a gallery of the best answers and tweets to propagate engagers, with discounts and giveaways to reward engaged followers, and encourage others to become more engaged in the future, having seen the benefits it could potentially bring them.

It’s important to remember that competitors will also be using the tournament as an opportunity to reach out to customers, so it’s important to be on the money with their approach, or you risk being lost in the crowd. By following these three steps, brands have an opportunity to score three times and secure a customer engagement victory.