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Engagement marketing is an advertising strategy which attempts to engage consumer in the branding of products
or services. In this era of social networking, blogs, and constant interchanges of emails and other bursts
of personal and professional communications – engagement marketing is looking at consumers as co-marketers.
Through the strategic use of engagement marketing enterprises and marketers can invite consumers to become the co-producers
on marketing campaigns, such as the creation of slogans, designs, videos, and other promotional viral advertisements.
The goal is to connect consumers with brands by engaging them in a cooperative
interaction. Engagement marketing is a strategy used to personalize the content marketed to a customer by engaging them via blogs,
live chat and product ratings. Through these web based technologies, companies are able to provide true transparency to their
products and services. They enable the creation of trust and loyal relationships with their customers. At
the core of engagement marketing is the realization that humans are highly social animals. Consumers have an innate need to
communicate and interact – which in today interconnected 24/7 life is the grease to engagement marketing. Engagement marketing requires a two-way
flow of information via consumer dialog. People embrace what they create and engagement marketing provides
them the means by which they can be part of a brand: it provides them an identity and a sense of belonging. Once individuals
were tied to their communities by geography and tradition – as recently as a decade ago marketers still used zip codes
to segment consumers into lifestyle clusters – today however these external forces no longer shape consumer’s
identity.
Consumer’s personal identity has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography
or tradition. The social networking generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of direct participation
and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. Today’s consumers have grown up with Google and
Yahoo in the engaging world of search and the interactive communication world of MySpace and YouTube. Today, we live in the world of engagement marketing in which transparency,
interactivity, immediacy, engagement, collaboration, experience and trust replace the world of mass media with that of social
media. Consumers are participating in creating brand messages and expressing themselves using the brands
that resonate with them. New enterprises such as Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model – where
engagement sits at the epicenter – where a consumer can create their own design and set up a shop to sell them.
 The
consumer is at the center of this enterprise Today’s
consumers personalizing the way they shop, interact, entertain, watch, listen and communicate. They’re
creating videos and watching what others have made, they listen to podcasts and record their own, and they share photos, songs,
jokes and information. They create and organize their network of friends and colleagues via streaming media, mobile media,
podcasts, rich Internet applications (RIA) and syndication technologies like really simple syndication (RSS). All
of these interactive consumer channels have the potential to provide engaging user experiences—and to keep visitors
coming back. But in order to ensure these engagements strategies are turning occasional visitors into longtime customers and
potential brand evangelists, marketers need to use consistent key performance indicators (KPIs). They need
to measure and optimize their engagement marketing campaign to ensure it is building brand loyalty. Engaging
consumers at an emotional level via the Web or wireless can provide rich insight and customer loyalty value. Marketers
and enterprises can design their own metrics, such as those discussed in previous chapter to measure branding or they can
turn to promoter measurement vendors such as Satmetrix.
 Satmetrix builds consumer loyalty via emotional engagement
Engagement
marketing can be facilitated by aligning the emotions of consumers. The difficulty of engagement marketing
is the measurement of emotions and their influence on brand loyalty. However, an econometric modeling approach
can yield quantifiable ROI where emotion and unconscious aspects of the consumer mind are engaged by the marketer or enterprise
for return on marketing investments (ROMI). The engagement metrics are based
on measuring 1) discovery, 2) evaluation, 3) use and 4) affinity for products and can be used offline and online to measure
the interaction that consumers have with brands. The metrics to measure each of these consumer events across
channels must be determined prior to any engagement marketing campaigns by marketers and enterprises.
Engagement marketing can be accomplished by creating good
will by associating messages to larger issues that consumers really care about – such as the environment involving emotional
advertising and cause marketing. Engagement marketing is important because a large percentage of Americans
say they have a more positive image of companies that support a cause they care about. Nearly two-third
indicated they would likely switch brands or retailers to one associated with a good cause. This can have
deep and long-lasting effect on the relationship with those consumers.
The key engagement marketing drivers are 1) surprise,
2) emotional bonding and 3) above all relevancy delivered in an indirect and non-intrusive manner. Consumer
engagement however is a new metric for digital marketers and enterprises with four metrics: 1) involvement, 2) interaction,
3) intimacy and 4) influence. Each built with digital data collected from multiple Web, wireless and offline
sources using behavioral analytics.
Traditional web analytics which count unique visitors, number of pages viewed and time spent per page capture some
involvement – but fail to capture the new metrics of engagement marketing – such as brand awareness, product loyalty,
and interactions (blogs), intimacy (reviews, opinions) and influence (ratings, surveys, recommendations). Involvement
is the most basic of metrics and reflects the measurable aspects of a consumer’s relationship with a brand.
Engagement
marketing is a fundamental switch from broadcasting marketing messages to consumers – to that of engaging consumer in
conversations – to obtain a more holistic appreciation of consumer actions and measuring their recommendations, product
reviews, survey results, and the tracking of their influences on others. Tracking only single consumer
transactions and loyalty misses these new dimensions of engagement marketing and the significant element of consumer influence.
Blogs and postings in social sites such as MySpace and YouTube
coupled with increasing social behavior online make it possible for consumer influence to be quantified via recommendations
to friends and user-generated content (UGC). Interactions measure the most valuable of all metric for engagement
marketing and UGC – in which consumers contribute content about a brand is the most valuable KPI. UGC
includes all types of digital media, such as digital video, blogging, podcasting, wireless and web photos and wikis. To capture
and measure this new metric of engagement marketing, social media tools and platforms may be required, such as Bazaarvoice
and UGENmedia to track and quantify product ratings and reviews, content uploaded and shared via connections on social networks.
The engagement marketing
variable of intimacy goes beyond interactions and focuses on measuring affection or sentiment a consumer has for a brand.
To quantify this metric a brand monitoring service such as Umbria a division of J.D. Power and Associates can be enlisted.
Umbria is a marketing intelligence company that analyzes social
media for consumer intimacy to brand in blogs, message boards, Usenet, and product review sites – it
provides engagement metrics and consumer insights into brands, markets, and trends. Other
social brand buzz monitoring agencies and consultancies, such as TNS Media, Intelligence/Cymfony, MotiveQuest, Biz360 and
BrandIntel can provide similar consumer engagement metrics regarding their sentiments as captured via all digital media.
Engagement
marketing uses influence metrics to measure a consumer’s likelihood to encourage others to consider, recommend, or purchase
a brand. In an increasingly wired and wireless social web world; opt-in surveys, questionnaires, chats,
and instant messaging platforms are a new metric for marketer and enterprise. Engagement consumer profiles
can be developed from passive – to semi-active participants – to the golden nugget: the brand zealot.
Tracking and modeling
via behavioral analytics of brand advocates and their product reviews or comments in discussion forums is important for marketers
and enterprises which may want to enlist the services of peer reviewers such as like Epinions, Bazaarvoice and TripAdvisor.
Or, an enterprise or marketer may choose to develop and implement its own influence metrics via its web analytics and other
behavioral analytics strategies. The important point is not to neglect this critical component of consumer
engagement in the overall behavioral analytics strategy for marketers and enterprises.
Consumers who make purchases acquired via review-related searches convert at a 60% higher rate than the average customer,
and spend 50% more per order. Enterprises and marketer need to perform behavioral analyzes, across multiple
touch points of both online and offline data streams in order to quantify the total lift of every channel. They
need to develop engagement profiles combining click stream data streams along with that from in-store transactions, phone
or catalog orders and call site calls for a 360 consumer view of their behaviors. Email offers are especially easy to monitor
and measure favorable responses the recent presidential election demonstrated the power of email in raising millions of voter
contributions and support.
While mobile carriers, record
labels, television networks and equipment providers throw a never-ending barrage of multimedia goodies at the wall to see
what sticks, users around the world keep growing the email market well into the tens of billions of dollars. Marketers
would do well to listen to what that messaging market is saying. The explosive success of accidental consumer applications
of email holds an important lesson that most consumers value mobile data for what it helps them do such as provided them mapa
and directions to retail stores as opposed to the content they can pull into a handset. The combination of e-mail and word-of-mouth
affords marketers a potentially vast, and very powerful, new marketing tool. Manufacturers
should track commentary in discussion forums to get ideas about product shortcomings and desired features consumers want.
Retailers should identify consumers who make significant product reviews that influence others’ purchases, and
then encourage those new converts to contribute comments and new content. Marketers need to create profiles
of product and services ‘champions’ in order to target more of these valuable evangelists. Marketers need to focus
on the acquisition of evangelists rather than exclusively on one-time purchasers. Marketers currently focus
on metrics like cost per thousands views (CPM), cost per click (CPC) and cost per acquisition (CPS) however a new metrics
is evolving in the social web and that is the cost per acquired advocate (CPAA). Marketers need to focus
on targeting brand zealots in order to measure engagement.
Marketers and enterprises also need to use emotions as part of their engagement marketing. All
advertising creates an emotional response irregardless of the channel. Even the driest ads can evoke some interest, curiosity,
or desire. The challenge for marketers and enterprises is to distinguish between the emotional content of the creative ad
and the viewers’ emotional response to the advertisement. The latter is far more important. It is ineffective to have
a warm, emotional marketing ad if this does not provide a favorable and positive emotional association to the brand.
One of the common pitfalls of emotional advertising is that they may be entertaining, but fails to sell directly the
brand. This can happen when the focus of the ad is on emotions within the ad instead of focusing on the emotions associated
with the brand.
Brands that
have created stronger emotional and personal associations tend to have higher purchase interest. Engaging the consumer and
getting a favorable emotional response is only the beginning of the motivational process. Ads that only
create “good, happy, warm, and fuzzy” emotions and fail to engage the consumers’ interest or curiosity are
likely to be weak in persuasion. If an ad can generate feelings of curiosity or interest, it is much more likely to be successful.
Some ads can score strongly for “happy, warm, and fuzzy” but still fail to persuade or motivate a change
in behavior. Conversely, some ads that stir curiosity are quite persuasive without being warm and fuzzy. However, several years ago neuroscientists at Baylor College
of Medicine decided to perform a taste test of Pepsi vs. Coke utilizing a brain scanning machine. Each person swallowed sips
of cola from a plastic tube while their brain was being scanned. When Coke and Pepsi were offered unlabeled, the subjects
showed no measurable preference for either brand. Most of the time, they couldn't even tell the two colas apart. But researchers
made a second observation – subjects overwhelmingly preferred drinks that were labeled as Coke – no matter what
cola was actually delivered through the tubes. In other words, brand trumped over taste. Coke ads are designed
to trigger feelings of warmth and nostalgia. They are sentimental, not informative. At
auto shows Volvo often sponsors a large screen with a parade of all of Volvo’s competitors across the screen, using
only a “brought to you by Volvo” message, resulting with an audience increasingly in the inclusion of Volvo in
their consideration by over 600%, from which modeling derived an estimated 90 to 1 ROI. Additionally, over
thirty studies for such companies as P&G, Nestle, American Express, Toyota, etc., with a simple and apparent ingratiation
effect of “brought to you by” indicate an average advantage of 7 to 1 over the average ad in terms of comparable
persuasion scales. Consumers like it when advertisers treat them with respect and consideration, and do
things in a gracious, human manner. A study done for TACODA found that Internet ads achieve more engagement when targets are reached by ads on sites
where the consumer does not expect to see ads in that category. Surprise is an emotion. Surprise is a powerful player in the
subconscious domain. Among the results of another TACODA study also found that behavioral analytics generated
an average of 17% more looks at these ads than contextual targeting, and after the first exposure, the advantage skyrockets
to 54%. The immediate implication of the TACODA studies is that not
only can behavioral analytics help advertisers create more engagement with consumers – but that the use of surprise
can improve response. These behavioral analytics techniques and advertising strategies can help ads be
noticed more often and for more time the more that consumers are exposed to them. As we have discussed
behavioral analytics uses various Internet mechanisms to reach people with highly relevant ads based on what they read and
where they navigate while contextual targeting places ads adjacent to editorial content unexpected to be visited by the targeted
audiences. Emotional advertising has captured the imagination of marketers
and enterprises that see an enormous potential to increase the recognition and loyalty of their brands. Enterprises
and marketers are moving across a wide spectrum of Web and wireless channels with marketing activities, from building awareness
to after-sales service, as part of their marketing strategies. In the light of the widespread use of these channels, the marketers
and enterprises need to target consumers by developing emotional bonding connection with them.
Today, a major amount of behavioral analytics in Web advertisements are created on the basis of emotional
integration appeals. Marketers and enterprises need to focus on the process of developing emotional connection with consumers
and the development of brand bonding with them. Facebook recently launched a new product it called ‘Engagement Advertisements’ that encourages members
to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans. In doing so consumer can begin to interact
with a brand and be a vital component of engagement marketing via their social network of friends. To combat dismal click
through rates of network ads, the Engagement Advertisements product uses interactive widgets to encourage users to increase
member adoption, viral growth, and brand interaction. Marketers and enterprises can use these widget ads
to create the targeted content that leverages engagement and social networking marketing as part of their behavioral analytics
strategy. Engagement
ads provide a couple of unique methods of delivery – rather than clicking on an networked ad and being whisked away to the sponsoring
website – these type of advertisements allow Facebook members to stay within the contained walls of the social networking
site with their group of friends. Engagement ads can take the form of ‘comments’ or ‘gift’
formats, both of which involve the use of emotional advertising. Engagement ads allow Facebook members to increasing interaction, social spread, and
brand engagement. Comments ads are were Facebook members can leave recommendations on these engagement advertisements, much like
wall posts. Marketers and enterprises that are focused on new entertainment and product rollouts –
like that of autos, electronics, wireless devices and apparel – are well suited for this type of engagement marketing,
especially for younger consumers. While, gifts ads are where members share and spread to their social network
news about new products, like say a new iPhone app, triggering a viral notification within their network.
Again, this type of engagement marketing is where the strategy is to allow the rabid brand evangelist to be part
of the process. Interactive widgets are readily available for
MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, TypePad, iGoogle or your own website, from widgetbox.com, yedda.com, KickApps.com,
widgipedia.com, and others. These interactive widgets can be used for launching engagement ads to attract and retain consumers
enabling them to share with their friends to make comments about products and services of interest to them.
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