Factors That Can Impact Customer Engagement for Your Brand

If you want to build long lasting customer engagement, you need to connect your consumers to your brand emotionally and rationally. The power of brand engagement is that a customer feels a positive emotional response whenever they come across your brand and they match that emotional response with the knowledge that your brand can satisfy that emotional response.

Brand engagement is more than just another way to connect with your customers – it’s the process of building a long-term relationship with your clients through consistent and intentional engagement. The beauty of marketing in the world of big data is that you can measure the types of engagement that are most effective for your brand.

Types of Engagement 

According to research done at UVA, “Engaged customers are worth 23% more than average customers.” Now, before exploring all the tools, gadgets, and gizmos at your disposal, you want to develop a strategy that connects with customers in a genuine way. Remember, a brand represents the people who built it, and customers want to interact with the human element of your brand (you). Engaging with your clients takes place across several levels that go by many names, but let’s keep this simple and think in terms of relationship:

• Brand Acquaintance – This is a surface level familiarity with your brand. They’ve seen you around, maybe they recognize you, but that’s about it.
  
• Brand Interactor – This is a step deeper than the surface, but not much. Maybe an Interactor has purchased one of your products, but still doesn’t know your brand.
  
• Friend of the Brand – A friend to your brand is engaged and familiar with your products. They have a positive disposition towards your products but aren’t fully engaged.
  
• Brand Ambassador – We cover Ambassadors more thoroughly in “Strategies for Building Consumer Trust in Your Brand”, but an Ambassador is engaged with and believes in your brand. These consumers support and market you in their circles.

The challenge is how do you move from Brand Acquaintance to Brand Ambassador? Here is where you use the different tools at your disposal to connect, to build brand trust, and to measure the impact of these tools. Let’s look at a few of your options:

Impressions

Impressions are the most basic unit measuring interactions between brand and potential consumers online. How this is measured can vary slightly on different platforms, but an impression should give you an idea of how many people saw your ad or post. This creates the all-important denominator for your target audience (and the interactions will give you an idea of successful advertising). As impressions turn into interaction (comments, likes, shares, etc.) engagement becomes your most powerful tool. Remember, people want human-to-human interaction, so do a little more than liking a nice comment whenever possible.

Qualified Leads

You’ve been running a marketing campaign for a few weeks, so how do you convert impressions into qualified leads? First, make sure that your marketing campaign includes some type of call-to-action. Maybe you have a newsletter with important information your brand can offer ideal clients for free. Maybe you have a free download they sign-up for. Whichever approach you take, you can collect information to fill your CRM and engage potential consumers offline. This will help you distinguish between who is interested in your brand and who just wanted that PDF download for free.

Conversions 

Now qualified leads can become your new denominator. As you focus on converting leads to consumers, you can take two basic approaches: 1) Go for the quick conversion and get the sales, or 2) Build a relationship between leads and your brand. The quick sales can be important for keeping things moving, but the returns are brief and you’re back to square one. Path number 2 is no different than any other relationship – sometimes there may be sparks right away, but often it will take some time.

RELATED: Use the methods discussed in Strategies for Building Consumer Trust in Your Brand.

Promoting Engagement

The challenge quickly becomes – what are the best methods to promote brand engagement and move from impressions to converted brand ambassadors? There are several tools and approaches you can take, and for PR campaigns it often helps to bring in outside and expert perspectives to get a different and honest angle on your public perception.

Use Several Platforms

Just like with investing, you never want all of your marketing eggs in a single basket. The difficult part is balancing how to manage multi-channel marketing across several social media platforms, through SEO, and in paid ads across different platforms. In 8 Ways to Reduce Your Marketing Budget, we highlight how using specialized software can help reduce overall cost, simplify campaign management, and leverage your reach.

Understand Timing

Timing is an easy strategy to misunderstand – this is not about collecting enough data on potential clients to know when to put the perfect ad in their Facebook feed. Rather, timing is all about being consistently there during the consumer’s decision-making process, so when the time is right, your brand is what comes to mind. You’ll want to keep this objective a priority when developing marketing campaigns – have short, mid, and long-term goals that campaigns can build off of to help grow engagement over time.

Incentivize Interaction

As mentioned above, creating a compelling call-to-action beyond “Buy! Buy! Buy!” keeps engagement high. Think of some low-cost options you can give away for free. Newsletters and email blasts are great, but they can be white noise too. Get creative for consistent, subscriber-based engagement with influencer marketing, reels, or a YouTube channel your ideal client will find helpful. Remember, a lack of incentive can cause your campaign to fail (see What Causes Marketing Campaigns To Fail?) and keep engagement at a minimum.

Offer Unique Value

Branding is all about Unique Value Propositions. If you cannot identify a problem in your consumer’s life and show how your brand uniquely solves that problem, it will be hard (if not impossible) to gain any traction no matter what tools, tips, and tricks you use. This is the great measuring stick for all marketing professionals – where is the value added? When working with a marketing team, you want to make sure they recognize your brand’s unique value add to customers and can provide innovative solutions to share that message in a meaningful and creative way.