The ability to attract, engage, and drive consumers to action is the sole purpose of marketing and sales. Mobile and digital communications makes it easier for brands to deliver their messages and connect to consumers. That is, if they are leveraging these channels within their existing structures. As brands continue towards digital transformation and innovating their marketing strategies, it’s worth auditing your consumer engagement strategy.
This may seem like a daunting task so, we’ve collected 10 questions to consider for evaluating consumer engagement. Keep these key areas in mind as you develop your brand experience and aim to improve customer engagement.
Would you do business with your company? It’s an important question to ask yourself as you consider ways of improving consumer engagement. If you have a memorable, frictionless, customer-centric experience, engagement and loyalty is likely better than if not. Of course, there are always areas for improvement, so when considering this, look for areas that could help to enhance the experience and guide consumers down the path to purchase. for consumers.
Consistent communication is integral to encouraging consumer engagement. However, consumers are not too keen on receiving marketing messages that don’t have something in it for them. So, marketers need to stay top of mind in more creative ways. What does your communication look like? Does it inspire and drive your consumers to action? There are so many channels for marketers to take advantage of today, but it’s important to know what channels your customer prefer the most. If you can determine this, you can more readily target communications through these touch-points.
This question is two-fold because before you look at the insights you currently have, it’s important to question how you’re getting those insights. Do your data acquisition systems need updating? Are you using first-party data, or relying on other methods of data collection? First-party data is important because it reflects the accuracy of your data, and what you do with it. If customers have willingly provided you with their personal information, then the insights you gather and the profiles you create are much more reliable than if not.
Naturally, realizing this will help you more effectively communicate and craft your marketing messages. By understanding who is currently engaging with your brand, you can understand those specific buyer personas and create content that caters to their needs. This will help you to better distribute your marketing budget and increase conversions on the content you distribute.
While it’s good to maintain a focus on growth and change, it’s also important to know if there are aspects of your marketing strategy that customers engage with consistently. Imagine changing your website or your e-mail format, only to find that it’s outraged your entire customer base.
If you’re using a CRM like Dynamics 365, for example, imagine what would happen if you could no longer automate your social media? This is a core component of building a strong brand presence and keeping consumers engaged.
When analyzing consumer engagement, you should put some expectations in place. As with any marketing metric you must measure it, and improve from there. If you have yet to establish firm KPIs for customer engagement, do so now. Plus, measuring engagement is more possible than ever before. Digital platforms allow us to see engagement metrics in real-time, so we can make changes and adjust to improve. Also, having KPIs in place helps your relationship with partners and vendors who have a clear understanding of what they have to do to help you reach them.
As previously mentioned, you likely have multiple buyer personas; some will be equally as important as others. Therefore, you must create engaging content that reaches a multitude of audiences. It’s not always easy to appeal to the masses but a strong marketing strategy will do just that. You will need to create content that casts a wide net. Additionally, different audiences may communicate differently, so knowing which devices and channels these consumers interact with, can help you to craft content that resonates with many different audience types.
As consumer engagement becomes more heavily measured online, brands must evaluate the tools and technologies they are currently using to execute these campaigns. Many brands are still learning to grasp digital transformation and may need to re-evaluate their strategy completely, while others are adding a layer to an already sophisticated digital experience. No matter where your brand is on its journey towards digital transformation, it’s important to conduct an annual audit of the existing technologies at play, and determine which are working effectively, and what areas could use improvement.
The power is layering on purchase intent (inferred through click behaviour and explicit through web forms) to then tone up or down promotional intensity and the strength of offers as relevant to the consumer. Integrating email communications, SMS and outbound with direct mail is pretty obvious and totally possible with these platforms since you get to design the communications sequences for each segment, and sub-segment.
At the end of the day, customer engagement means nothing if it does not result in brand revenue. The ultimate goal of your engagement strategy should be to help boost sales and drive brand loyalty, resulting in return purchases. So, be sure to evaluate whether or not your engagement campaigns are actually making a difference commercially, or if you should be rethinking your strategy altogether.