Our digital world makes it easier to connect with consumers. And this connection can improve your marketing efforts. 33% of marketers think engaging with the right audience will reach marketing goals.
But marketers are left with many struggles. The digital landscape is highly competitive. Several brands are trying to reach your niche audience. There are also several marketing strategies available and it can be difficult to know how to reach your audience.
Most brands can defeat the competition and remain memorable with engagement marketing. But what is engagement marketing?
Engagement marketing (also called experimental marketing) uses strategic content to entice an audience. A successful engagement marketer sees customers as collaborators with the brand, instead of just clients or an audience to absorb their advertising messages.
Instead of using generalized messages, engagement marketing uses a more conversational approach. A common engagement marketing strategy is creating memorable social media posts that attract responses.
This way, you’re interacting directly with your audience rather than publishing a general advertising message.
The internet is changing the modern consumer. Customers are no longer blindly making major purchases. Your audience desires education and a chance to connect with a brand.
With the wealth of information available, buyers make more informed decisions and could be farther into the sales funnel than you expect. Customers are also smart enough to guide their own buyer’s journey, limiting the sales aspect of marketing.
What’s the solution? Help out your customer. This is exactly what engagement marketing provides. You’re providing useful education and making the buying process as easy as possible.
What are the ways to educate and connect with customers? Blogging, strategic websites, and landing pages, targeted email marketing, and even strategic lead generation are all great examples.
Types of Customer Engagement.
You can measure audience engagement in different ways. Here are some common examples.
This is the classic form of engagement when your audience regularly participates in one or more of your channels. Common examples include liking your social media posts and reading your blogs. Achieving this engagement means your brand is not only intriguing but is also personable.
Contextual engagement targets customers based on data and behavioral analysis. Common examples include using programmatic language to track customer buying habits and using this information to communicate different product and sales promotions.
Your business practices can entice a larger audience. For example, if you promote sustainable business practices, vegan/cruelty-free products, and more, you can engage with your customers based on these principles.
Emotional engagement is a common advertising practice but you can also tap into emotions with engagement marketing. In your marketing, you should not only reinforce the emotional ties your customers have with your brand but also your products.
Every engagement marketing campaign is different. But are you unsure where to start? Follow these easy steps.
Your unique audience will determine how you run your engagement marketing campaign. That’s because your audience determines how you promote your products, your brand positioning, and your unique marketing strategies.
Every audience also reacts to different types of messages. For example, some niches are inspired by emotional content while others desire answers to their problems.
It’s also recommended you create a persona for your audience. Identify what they do for a living, why they would be interested in your products, etc.
Your unique audience influences your marketing goals. Now that you understand your audience better, you can create a goal-driven strategy. Some engagement marketing-specific goals include improved brand visibility, increased sales, creating better content, and improved lead generation tactics.
Content is the basis of your engagement marketing strategy. You’ll not only want to create goal-driven content but content that delivers a powerful message to your niche audience.
Your content should not only be educational but also interesting. Include a unique take on an industry topic or post the latest industry updates.
Every blog post should end with a CTA that inspires your audience to continue interacting with your brand.
Engagement marketing aims to, well, engage. The best way to engage with your audience is by conversing directly with your customers.
If your customers directly reach out to you, listen to their ideas and questions. Make it easy for customers to contact you. Offer a chatbot on your website, practice visibility on social media, and more.
Don’t wait for your customers to contact you. For example, if there’s a trending topic or hashtag on social media, participate in the conversation. Make your voice be heard and prevent hiding behind your products and services.
Your engagement strategy will mean nothing if your website isn’t the most engaging aspect of your company.
Start by giving every page a purpose. Your home page, product pages, and even contact pages should entice your audience. Ideally, all of your pages should have the same purpose. For example, you can include a contact form so your visitors can sign up for a free consultation.
If you own an e-commerce site, make the buying process as easy as possible. For example, offer a one-click buying platform. All customers have to do is add the product to their cart, review the order, and purchase. They do this on one screen — no need to jump through different pages or distract customers by signing up for newsletters.
Several modern marketing tools not only make the engagement marketing process easier but also more effective.
If you struggle to put your audience first, social and marketing activation can help you achieve this. Certain tools can help you optimize data and identify your goals to improve your engagement marketing program.
There are also methods, such as neuromarketing, that helps you better understand the decision-making process. You can use this data to relate to your audience.
For many marketers, engagement marketing is a brand new territory. It’s easy to not understand some of the tactics and ideas behind engagement marketing. Here are the common questions asked.
The basis of engagement marketing is strategy, content, and connection. This means you can link engagement marketing principles to a myriad of other marketing strategies.
SEO: An effective SEO campaign will use a combination of tactics to rank well in search engine results. The basis of SEO is content, so optimizing your content for engagement marketing will increase website traffic and leads.
Social media: A smart social media strategy entices your audience in different ways, such as sharing posts, collaborating with influencers, asking questions, and creating content that attracts your audience.
Product promotion: Instead of merely creating ads promoting your products, engagement marketing brings your products directly to customers. This can include messages on your website, app notifications, and targeted emails.
Lead generation: As stated previously, your customers can educate themselves through the buying process. To lead them further, communicate with them by personalizing your emails and hosting different customer account tiers.
Mobile apps: 68% of users enable app push notifications on their phone. That’s why mobile apps are a useful tool in your engagement marketing kit. Use programmatic language to identify user behavior, personalizing the app experience.
Every brand will see results differently. Many aspects affect engagement marketing differently, such as audience size, current digital presence, the prevalence of your niche, and more. It’s important to only measure your own results and take other factors into account, such as your ROI.
In addition, engagement marketing isn’t a one-time marketing solution. It’s meant to be used in the long-term to generate continuous results.
Many marketing strategies work synonymously with your sales strategy. But what about engagement marketing? Yes, but in a nontraditional way.
Engagement marketing aims to make a meaningful connection with your audience. Since your audience trusts you and enjoys supporting your business, sales and customer engagement will increase.
If you own a brick-and-mortar business, you can host many engagement marketing strategies in store. Examples include contests and other store events.
Once you start achieving engagement marketing success, your customers will be contacting your business through multiple mediums. Does that mean you should interact with every customer?
This depends on the context. For example, if a customer contacts you on social media with a question, you should absolutely respond to them. But it’s also common for brands to experience spam. If a comment or message sounds spammy, delete it.
As we stated previously, engagement marketing can be combined with many marketing strategies. But how do you add engagement marketing ideas into an existing campaign?
Restrategize your campaign. Focus on some strategies more than others; for example, put more emphasis on content creation rather than advertising.
As you start implementing engagement marketing strategies, you’ll learn some tips to enhance your campaign. Here are some tips to help you get started.
There are many ways to connect with customers outside of social media and customer service platforms.
Respond to customer reviews on different review websites. See if your customers are talking about your brand on Reddit and other forums. Respond to their conversations and offer a helping hand.
What better way to conduct audience research than by looking at your existing customers. Regularly run surveys and target your retaining customers. Get a better idea of their wants, needs, demographics, pain points, and more.
Instead of setting large engagement marketing goals, set mini-goals that lead to a larger goal. These mini-goals will build momentum, inspiring you to continue engaging with customers.
In addition, daily goals are also crucial to your campaign. Devote time every day to reach out to your audience. Try and produce content every day, whether it’s on your blog or your social media channels.
All marketers know tracking metrics is the best way to know if your strategies are effective or if they’re failing. But it can be difficult to track your engagement marketing metrics.
For social media, you shouldn’t only measure your likes and shares but the number of people who share and comment on your posts. Audience website growth and click-through rates are also effective metrics, but you’ll also want to measure how many customers contact you directly.
You want to be your industry’s leader. To achieve this, you have to advance over the competition. But if you notice your audience is connecting more with your competitors, see what they’re doing differently. Look at the content they’re posting, how they respond to customers, and more.
93% of marketers think interactive content is effective in educating buyers. That’s why interactive content is the cornerstone of any profitable engagement marketing campaign.
Interactive content helps your audience absorb your message easier and better engages them. Great interactive content examples include surveys, polls, and contests.
When it comes to audience engagements, more is truly merrier. And what better way to attract a wider audience to by using your existing customers?
A strategy many brands use is a contest, asking followers to share a post or tag friends. This way, you’re increasing visibility while achieving a reaction from existing audience members.
A classic sales strategy is upselling, enticing customers to buy products before they checkout. But if you want to engage customers, the upselling process should happen after the initial sale.
Upselling before a sale looks too spammy and may result in the loss of a customer. In addition, customer retention results in a 25% profit increase — if they already liked the products and services you offer, they will continue supporting your business.
Engagement marketing aims to entice your audience with targeted and strategic content, inspiring a lasting connection. But successful engagement marketing can be difficult to achieve.
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