Engagement Marketing: How To Do It Right

Among the indicators that can be referred to determine the success of a strategy, we undoubtedly find engagement marketing. With the transition from outbound to inbound marketing thanks to the advent of digital technology – where communication is no longer one-way – it is essential for brands to create and nurture a solid relationship with their customers, to involve, conquer and retain them.

To maintain an open dialogue, companies rely on the strength of engagement marketing, thus devising content and strategies that aim to interact directly with customers who, by responding, will demonstrate their involvement. So let’s find out together how engagement marketing works and why it’s important for brands.

What Is Engagement Marketing?

The term engagement marketing refers to that set of market analysis techniques based on user experience, interaction, and participation. With the transition from outbound marketing – in which the strategy consisted in communicating a one-to-many message without the possibility of dialogue – we move on to experiential marketing that places the consumer at the center.

Once perceived as distant, the company interacts with customers: communication thus becomes many-to-many, with content reigning supreme. This, designed ad hoc based on target profiling, must attract, convert, close, and delight consumers, all within a personalized dialogue whose focus is always to strengthen the relationship between brands and customers.

The Importance Of Engagement Marketing For A Brand

In the era of Information Overload, where consumers are bombarded with advertisements and messages throughout the day on all types of channels, it’s hard to notice anything that involves something other than us personally. A company that wants to position itself in the market must consider that cultivating relationships with customers is essential for retaining loyal customers and acquiring new ones. 

Creating real experiences and using the profiling features of your customers allow you to create tailor-made messages that intercept consumers in the daily chaos. A real revolution has taken place in the online world: through websites, emails, and social media, a company has all the necessary tools to develop a lasting connection between brands and consumers that is lasting, and that reduces the distance that separates them.

A Good Engagement Marketing Strategy

A self-respecting engagement marketing strategy must start by analyzing and studying one’s target audience to understand what to leverage for engaging communication. The content to be created must be captivating, interactive, and quick to see, even when time is short.

Emotions are also fundamental. Generating trust is essential for any company that wants to grow sales and brand awareness, which is why the brand will have to “get naked” and prove itself credible in the eyes of consumers. An engagement marketing strategy is based on three fundamental characteristics :

1. it must be engaging;
2. it must be participatory;
3. it must not interrupt the user’s navigation;
4. it must shorten the distance between the brand and the consumer.

Consumers are, in fact, the protagonists: all the brand’s activity revolves around them, hoping to convert prospects into actual customers by exploiting the potential of digital and inbound marketing.

The Tools Of Engagement Marketing

The three key tools in an engagement marketing strategy, which allow you to achieve a good degree of involvement, are:

1. Email: Email marketing is a great way to build engagement. Sending emails that contain information about a particular product or call-to-action messages allows brands to reach people and be present in their routine. Thanks to the communication power of email and the ability to send emails on a large scale, the company can achieve brand awareness goals and convert and retain customers. A plus is personalized emails to reduce the distance the customer perceives towards a brand.
2. Company blog: posting content, sharing them, and commenting on them in a blog section of the company website is another way to allow users to feel close to the brand by publishing reviews and feedback or asking for advice and information. The brand-consumer gap narrows, and the link between the two strengthens.
3. Social media: social networks are virtual places where users surf casually daily. For a company, therefore, being present on social media is a must to intercept users in the peak turnout ranges through interactive and eye-catching messages. A community of active online fans can help the brand trigger automatic word-of-mouth circuits, which is useful for greater brand awareness and popularity.

How To Measure Engagement Rate

To understand if an engagement marketing strategy has been successful, it is necessary to calculate the engagement rate, or involvement rate, which is one of the most used metrics to measure the results of one’s performance. The engagement rate can be calculated by referring to a page or a single post.

1. In the first case, it is necessary to add the comments and interactions that have obtained all the posts of the page in question. The result must be divided by the page’s fan base and then multiplied by 100.
2. In the case of a single post, however, the operation is simpler: you have to add up the overall interactions of a post and divide what you get by the fan base.

To have reliable data and effectively check how much users interact with the brand, it is useful to rely on regular and periodic reports to have the page’s progress under control and understand the strengths and weaknesses. In conclusion, engagement marketing responds perfectly to the current needs of companies, proving to be increasingly important for building company databases, now fundamental in the digital marketing era.

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