Engagement. This has been the keyword in the marketing world for some time.
In the Digital Marketing context, the term refers to how consumers interact directly with the brand through different actions, such as clicks, likes, comments, and shares.
This is important not only to increase the company’s reach and relevance in the Internet scenario but also to facilitate the creation of profitable relationships.
The more engaging your brand experiences are, the higher the lead conversion rate is.
Therefore, it is essential to rely on strategies focused on stimulating this kind of behavior in the audience — and that’s where Engagement Marketing comes in.
If you don’t know what it means or you want to learn how to apply the concept in your business? In this article, I will cover:
- What is Engagement Marketing?
- What benefits does it provide?
- How can this strategy be applied in your business?
Shall we?
What is Engagement Marketing?
Engagement Marketing encloses techniques, strategies, and practices focused on boosting audience participation, providing the appropriate scenario for building a good relationship with leads, customers, and users.
To understand the relevance of all this, it is necessary to understand consumer 4.0, a dominant profile in the modern market.
Concerned with the quality of the buying journey and enjoying great access to information, this group gives preference to brands that provide qualified experiences, in which their participation is active.
It is a phenomenon that results from the connectivity reached by digital transformation, which has allowed clients to connect directly with brands using the internet.
As Digital Marketing is an extremely competitive environment, the companies that manage to be more effective in this relationship are ahead of the others.
If a customer engages with your content, it paves the way for you to guide them towards the purchase decision.
What benefits does it provide?
In the previous paragraph, I made clear that applying a good Engagement Marketing strategy eventually results in increased sales.
However, this is the objective you should have in the long term, and, to reach it, you must consider the most immediate advantages.
Think, for example, about your digital strategy as a whole. Either to generate leads or to close sales, it is important to count on an attractive website and a high degree of authority. And engagement plays a key role in this process.
If you employ a good SEO strategy and thus attract users to your portal, you must ensure that they are interested in the experience.
A poor website, without incentives for engagement, tends to drive visitors away and raise the bounce rate.
However, if your approach allows for visitor engagement, the visitor will likely spend more time on the site, visiting several pages and getting to know your brand better.
This can be the initial step for the user to start consuming your content, become a lead, enter a nurturing process, and convert.
However, the engagement on the internet is not just about your website, much less closing sales.
Increases brand authority
If your company works with a Content Marketing strategy, you know the challenge of positioning your blog among the first results of SERPs.
To pursue this goal, it is essential to use SEO techniques to please Google’s algorithm, which establishes the ranking through various criteria.
One of them is the domain’s authority, which is determined by a series of factors such as external links, accesses, and traffic volume.
Thus, by focusing on lead engagement, you create a mechanism that increases your domain’s authority, raising your position in the ranking.
For this to work, you need to motivate engagement on all channels. Linking your site to social media, for example, is a good way to generate authority.
Generates knowledge about the persona
You already know what a buyer persona is, right? It is a semi-fictitious profile used to represent your ideal consumer and serve as a basis for implementing communication and marketing strategies. Naturally, therefore, it is necessary to know in-depth the characteristics of your target audience.
When a visitor engages with your content, they open a two-way dialogue. After all, by taking such action, they generate valuable insights into their behavior.
So, think about your social media. The number of likes and shares in each of your posts clearly indicates the preferences of the followers. If your videos are more successful than the images, for example, this indicates that the public prefers this type of content.
It is also possible to extract more specific information. Many strategies involve the use of interactive content, such as quizzes and polls, which are excellent for testing the level of knowledge of the audience and defining their positioning in the sales funnel.
Enables strategy optimization
The natural result of understanding your buyer persona is the optimization of your strategy.
The more data you gather about your audience, the more effective your campaigns will be on all channels. Think about an email marketing approach, for example.
If you insert links in your messages, you can measure which campaigns receive the most clicks. From this, you can apply A/B tests to define which elements are most effective in attracting public attention. Then, you just have to make adjustments to increase the success rate.
Increases, organically, the reach of the brand
Many people still think about Digital Marketing as if it involved a large investment in ads. But strategies like Inbound Marketing prove that this is not the reality.
If you get good engagement rates, it will increase your channels’ reach and relevance in a completely organic way.
And this is not just about the positive ranking that can be achieved in search engines; engaged consumers often share positive experiences with others, generating more business opportunities for your company.
How can this strategy be applied in your business?
Well, now that you know the advantages of Engagement Marketing, you must be wondering how to access them in your business.
As with any type of strategy, your success depends on a strategic approach, in addition to a continuous optimization plan.
Check out some tips that can help in this process.
Customize the experience
With so much technology at our disposal, customizing the customer experience is an increasingly accessible task.
Personalized service is fundamental to get closer to the consumer and establish certain credibility for your brand. When this happens, engagement is a consequence.
Therefore, focus on the segmentation of your audience. This way, it is possible to trigger more effective campaigns and messages, using elements that fully answer your persona’s needs.
Invest in Content Marketing
Investing in Content Marketing is critical to getting the engagement rate you want for your brand.
This is because the strategy involves a complete approach to the most relevant channels in the digital environment, enabling you to offer content that can attract, engage, and convert the audience.
Content Marketing is based on SEO practices, and the production of quality materials for each sales funnel phase.
From this, you can establish quality dialogues with the audience, understanding and solving their main problems.
To maximize engagement, work with CTA buttons, the famous calls-to-action. They encourage the consumer to perform certain actions and increase the time visitors spend on your company’s channels.
If the strategy enhances the level of audience engagement in the medium term, in the bigger picture, it consolidates your brand as an authority in the market.
Consider Interactive Marketing
Interaction Marketing focuses on the use of interactivity as a central component of content production. Interactive content has much higher engagement rates than static content, as it facilitates and motivates user participation.
Therefore, seek to understand your audience’s characteristics to define how to implement this interactivity. Several formats can be used, and, in many cases, it is even possible to convert your static materials into interactive.
A common example involves ebooks. Do you have a complete guide that generates a positive reaction in the audience?
Using a specialized tool, such as Ion Interactive, you can turn it into an interactive page, making it easier for readers to navigate and engage.
Pay attention to feedback and measure results
Throughout the process, it is essential to be guided by relevant analyses and insights. Remember that the strategy is only successful if it can effectively satisfy consumers. Therefore, pay attention to what they have to say.
A good idea is to generate engagement in a way that stimulates feedback from the audience. You can do this through social media messages, opinion polls, and a variety of other resources.
For example, Instagram’s Stories offer a question box, which you can use to listen to what the followers have to say.
In addition to paying attention to the public reaction, it is important to base your analysis on data.
Collecting and evaluating information about the performance of your content and approaches is the only way to determine if the strategy can improve, in addition to figuring out how to do it.
In Conclusion
Engagement Marketing is an indispensable strategy for any brand inserted in the digital environment. By engaging your audience, you open space to establish a relationship of trust, which reflects in more positive results.
Besides, this approach can generate unique and valuable insights.
Mark Your Calendars
Ok Folks (drumroll please) it’s time to announce our very LAST Community Call of the year, and it’s gonna be a doozy that you absolutely won’t want to miss.
We’re calling it: 10 Reasons Why You Need to Get Off Facebook.
Oh yes, we’re going there. Why? Time and time again we see people like you, trying to get more audience, authority and reach… just spinning their wheels and throwing wads of cash at Facebook with NO real results.
Nada. Zilch.
We’re going to take a deep dive into why Facebook just isn’t an effective platform for real meaningful connections that can literally change your business and why LinkedIn is the KEY to making it really happen.
Join us, The B Lee’s , on November 16th at 10:30am CST and get in on all the action. We’re kicking 2021 to the curb with a bang! See you there!