What is engagement marketing

When boiled down to the core function of your engagement, this strategy can fit one or more of seven different purposes from the following list: Active engagement. This essentially recruits users to actively engage with one or more of your channels.

Think about when you ask users to provide feedback when posing a question about your brand or to share a sample of your product with a friend. For this specific type of engagement to work, you need to be personable while also explaining exactly what you want your customers to do. Ethical engagement. Ethical engagement is all about demonstrating your commitment to your customers, employees and community.

Hosting fundraisers, promoting great work-life balances for your staff, and focusing on moral missions can all work well and make customers want to be involved with your brand. Contextual engagement. This is a type of engagement that brands are able to track through analytics that detail who the user is and what their behavioral motivations are.

This information is actionable and it should be used to create content designed to appeal to this target audience, using the data at hand as valuable context. For example, this might include reaching out to a customer with a push notification to buy an item that complements their recent purchase. Convenient engagement. Emotional engagement. Emotions carry a lot of weight in marketing. They resonate with your target audience in a powerful, memorable way, and they can be a major driving force.

Emotional engagement, therefore, is all about reinforcing the emotional ties that the client has to a brand and what it's doing or offering. An example may include a business that promises to donate a pair of shoes or socks for every pair purchased by the customer. Brand Loyalty Engagement marketing is designed to bring users into your brand. A helpful how-to or step-by-step guide on a topic that your data has shown is important to your ideal customer is a simple but effective tool.

Social media: Popular social networking sites Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter are perfect for engagement marketing because they offer a simple means for people to have a conversation directly with brands in a way that has never before been possible.

Email campaigns: Emails are a great tool for engagement marketing because they are delivered directly to your audience's personal inbox. By first engaging fans and consumers in the act of shaping the brand identity itself, there is increased brand awareness and development of brand relationships well before launching any official media campaign.

To ensure a great campaign, keep these important principles of engagement marketing in mind: A relentless focus on building trust Embracing strong two-way communication An exchange of value A relationship focus A long-term view Now, here are the three most common mistakes to watch out for in order to keep your campaigns on track and your customers engaged. Read this next. How to Build a Facebook Ad Funnel. Back to our blog. Get Free Instant Access.

I consent to receive email messages from Single Grain. Schedule Your Free Consultation. Set up a free consultation with a marketing specialist. Just a few more details. What services are you interested in? Their highly engaged audiences — which are tracked primarily through promo codes — are essential to driving higher conversion. This is not an optimal choice for established brands, but it shows that sacrifice of broad reach in favor of highly engaged audiences is worthwhile, even if it means you have a few more promo codes floating around in cyberspace.

The next option is retargeting. Most of your display or social advertising may be retargeting. This works even better in the case of things like cart retargeting. What you need is technology that offers both higher conversion and allows you to learn more specific information about your individual consumers , and this means engagement is critical at every stage of your marketing funnel. Conversational AI is the best way brands can achieve this today.

It may seem like a faraway opportunity, but the benefits are quite clear. By engaging consumers in a conversation using products like virtual product advisors , you can answer basic questions, offer diagnostics, provide recommendations and reassure customers about their best purchasing choices. This empowers you to involve higher levels of personalization in your media mix , but also reduce the instance of irrelevant marketing — an all-too-common occurrence today that actually pushes most consumers away.

Within the experience itself, brands can also deploy tools like Conversational Conversion Optimization , which leverages even more AI to achieve the best possible sales outcome for each conversation in the fastest possible way.

For example, using a virtual product advisor in your advertising, on social channels and as a core call-to-action on your eCommerce website can surface specific concerns, create opportunities to talk and then simplify product selection, building a relationship and increasing purchase confidence at every step in the process.

Most of your customers already have disjointed decision journeys — they look at your website, competitors, review sites, third-party media, talk to sales representatives, consult industry experts, newsletters, family and friends. Even Google offers custom intent audiences based on search, which also pre-packages consumers on the basis of existing engagement.

Generating your own data for this, with greater knowledge based on a one-to-one understanding of your consumers, is only the next logical step. More of the channels you look to for reach are already trying to use engagement to improve outcomes. This goes to show that creating branded hashtags and engaging with customers on social media is a fool-proof way to develop organic engagement.

They also offer virtual consultations, experiences, and a live chat so that customers feel valued and are able to meet their individual beauty needs.

By leveraging customer data like birthdays and makeup preferences, Charlotte Tilbury is able to offer a customized beauty experience for each customer. The first thing your marketing team has to decide is what constitutes great customer engagement marketing for your brand. That depends on your content and your audience. What kind of stories are you going to tell? They also disengage when the content contains heavy text or bullet points. These things get in the way of telling a story and make it less likely that readers will remember anything your content said.

In other words: Solid well-crafted stories matter more than anything else in your engagement strategy. You just have to go a little deeper into your content marketing strategy and think about what else you can do with your content. It could be as simple as sending a personalized email or SMS that addresses your customer by name, recommends products related to a previous purchase, and then links to content about how to install or maintain a product. You could also link to content not directly tied to the product the customer bought, like a thought leadership post on a related topic or a blog about a charity or cause your brand supports.

They will remember that your brand is interested in a lot more than simply getting them to buy all the stuff in their carts. That includes everything from your single biggest asset — data — to a manageable tech stack and, of course, a great team of marketing strategists and writers. Tons of brands use tech solutions to engage their audience.

You race to extract data and then have little time or energy left over to decide what the optimal use of that data is. One of the best things you could do is find a platform that integrates with your touchpoints and pulls data into one place. A customer engagement platform CEP helps to eliminate silos, unify customer data, and achieve customer centricity. This helps drive more intelligent and personalized omnichannel engagement. You still need to plot out your strategy, but you already have the raw materials for one-to-one marketing.

What brands need to do now is go beyond predictive algorithms and strike up conversations between the brand and the audience.

A customer engagement platform is a software that eliminates data silos, unifies customer data, and drives more effective omnichannel customer engagement. Having product, customer interaction, and other data integrated into one single customer view helps achieve customer centricity and provides you with the metrics, segments, variables, and analytics that are most relevant to your business.