For many marketers, performance is based on one metric: the almighty conversion rate. That’s how the C-suite judges whether any campaign is a success or not.
But today’s market is teeming with different brands selling thousands of similar products and services, which means that discounts, clean transactional journeys, and segments are not enough to differentiate your brand anymore… or drive up that almighty conversion rate.
Why? Because everybody can deliver an entry-level browse-to-purchase experience.
However, consumers’ expectations have risen above a bare-bones experience. Customers want brands to prove how much their business is valued — and not with discounts or free gifts.
Customers flock to brands that go beyond making a sale and carry on conversations with their audience. Conversions are still the end goal in this new wave of customer engagement marketing, but brands who can provide relevant content that helps, informs and inspires customers will enjoy better growth than brands who can barely get your name right in an email.
What Is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement marketing is defined as a marketing strategy that focuses on increasing the engagement your customers have with your brand by delivering personalized messages and interacting with customers across whichever channels they prefer.
Ideally, excellent customer engagement is a two-way conversation, and content is the primary medium for brands to initiate and maintain the conversation. Companies can engage with customers across a variety of channels including email, web, social media, community forums, and more. Add in machine learning, and suddenly you can predict future behavior, recommend products, and enrich the conversation to offer customers something greater than your products and services alone.
The customer benefits significantly from this because it’s all personalization fuel, ensuring that brands will give them what they want, address their pain points, and offer solutions that create an emotional response. This is the best way a brand can demonstrate just how valuable its audience is and retail loyal customers for years to come.
Leveraging Customer Engagement Marketing
Customer engagement marketing isn’t an entirely new concept. It’s supposed to be the goal of all marketing, and most brands intend to engage with their customers. But some do it better than others.
The main challenge for marketers is that a lot of requests come across their desks. With everybody wanting you to prioritize their content over all the others, marketers end up spending way too much time managing customer profiles, pulling data from disparate systems, and slapping together email and social messaging to meet the week’s objectives.
This leaves little time or energy for creating an effective customer engagement strategy. If you haven’t carefully thought about the entire omnichannel breadth of engagement options, you might end up with an ambivalent execution and a waste of your resources.
Proper, well-executed customer engagement marketing will make customers feel like they are recognized members of the brand, encouraging customer loyalty and reducing customer churn.
Why Brands Should Shift to a Customer Engagement Marketing Strategy
As a key component of customer engagement marketing, content marketing continues to grow year after year, and believe it or not, thousands of brands either haven’t invested in content or are just starting to do it now. According to eMarketer, about 80% of marketing professionals around the globe said they expect content-led campaigns to grow over the next two years.
When U.S. CMOs are asked to prioritize the way they plan to spend marketing dollars, 86% reported that content marketing is the most crucial .
There’s a reason for this upsurge in content marketing. According to an Adobe study, brands who marry a strong omnichannel presence with engaging content strategies may gain:
- 10% increase in YoY growth
- 10% increase in AOV (average order value)
- 25% increase in close rates
I certainly believe this makes the case for developing a new focus on customer engagement marketing.
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!
