Engagement Through Marketing: Does it Really Matter?
You hear a lot about engaging your customer or user and the importance of this as a marketing technique. The better your engagement, the better your sales. However, the exact meaning of engagement is a bit convoluted, and measuring its success proves difficult, if not impossible.
So does engagement really play a role in your marketing strategy? Today we’re going to try to wrap our heads around it.
What is Engagement?
When your brand is being engaged by your many followers or readers or users, you may feel like you’re nailing your whole engagement project. But what do you consider to be engagement and is that really getting you sales?
The problem is that engaging with your customer means different things to different marketing strategists. Some believe it’s simply getting the attention of your audience and inspiring interaction. Others believe it’s getting brand awareness. And still more base it on how many likes they receive.
The real issue is that brand engagement should be intended to drive sales, but along the way, engagement has become more about getting shares or followers, and while that undoubtedly does bring sales in, shares and followers are not the end goal, just the means to the end goal.
How Do I Know if My Engagement Strategy is Working?
Herein lies the problem. Sure, if we’re talking about looking at shares and likes and impressions and comments we can see data, numbers that give us reason to believe our engagement strategy is working.
But, how often have you engaged with a brand just for information and not bought whatever they were selling? Or how many likes have you given a brand that never materialized sales? These are examples of vanity analytics and don’t have anything to do with actual sale metrics.
The fact is, if we’re discussing engagement’s real purpose, its intent to drive sales, there are no reliable metrics to analyze its effect.
Don’t get too disappointed though. The social media platforms recognize this problem and are going to adapt. This will come in the form of follow-up questions about ads after they’ve been seen on a feed, tracking page scrolling, and tools specific to the social media platform that will provide data to the brand.
Should I Keep My Engagement Strategy Going?
Yes. Engagement still works. Likes, shares, comments, vanity engagement, that’s all great for your brand. Getting in front of new and more faces certainly won’t harm you. Just be sure you understand that because a user hearted your picture, doesn’t mean they’ve bought your product- or ever will.
Understand who, when, and where your buyers are and be there too and then compel them to take the action you want them to. Interactive content is a tried and true way of getting customers, so are real-life and online events. Think about what your audience would like and go for it.
The point is, engagement does still matter and it can still work, but for now, don’t invest so much in your engagement strategy that other marketing techniques suffer. We’ve all been blinded by the flashy likes and while that’s a great feeling, likes don’t equate to sales.
If you have any questions about your engagement strategy or digital marketing campaign, The Great Online would love to help. Give us a call and let’s get you the likes that matter.
