Several elements go into Brand Building & Brand Engagement. This includes the image, personality, positioning, promise, guidelines, etc. This is because all these factors combine to define the brand and give it its overall perception.
Furthermore, it helps to create awareness and stir customers’ loyalty to the brand. Branding takes lots of effort, money, and time. Organizations have to invest in television or radio airtime, pay for billboard and print ads, and, most importantly, market digitally.
This is why once the initial branding is done, businesses put in lots of effort to maintain it to avoid rebranding expenses. And this is where brand engagement comes in.
Brand engagement helps businesses to maintain their image and market positioning. It is a way of binding users to the brand.
If done rightly, brand engagement can speed up the conversion of leads into loyal customers. This article explains the basics of brand engagement. And how you can leverage it to win customers’ trust.
Importance of Brand Engagement
There is no doubt that most of the buying decisions we make are more emotional than logical. You can build an emotional connection with your target audience with brand engagement. However, it all starts with understanding your brand’s identity. The importance of brand engagement are;
Increased Customer Engagement
The ultimate goal of brand engagement strategies is to increase the customers’ engagement with the business. This includes acquiring new customers, increasing their CLV, and receiving direct feedback from them.
It also involves influencing their purchase decisions. For instance, good brand engagement can make customers buy three products instead of one.
Better Products or Services
A good brand engagement strategy includes receiving actionable feedback from consumers. Customers who are satisfied with a brand tend to give testimonials and reviews comfortably. This can help you discover your business’s shortcomings and threats and tap into viable opportunities.
Happy Employees
As we’ll see from the next section, it’s not only customers that you need to engage with. A brand that engages well with its workers can inspire, motivate, and develop a good relationship with them. Therefore, enabling them to produce better results.
Community Building
Brand engagement can stir up a community of customers. These communities are known for sharing beneficial intel and updates and providing guidance to new customers. And with them, the business can earn more of the public’s trust.
Types of Brand Engagement
For many businesses, increasing brand engagement is about the customers alone. While attracting and nurturing leads is essential, the people behind them must not be left out. Therefore, the two types of brand engagement are;
1. Internal Engagement
Indeed, the birth of newer technologies has made several work processes easier. However, we cannot overlook humans’ contribution to a business’s growth.
According to Forbes, organizations have three types of employees. The engaged are a mere 15%, those not engaged makeup 67%, and 18% are actively disengaged. The non-engaged 67% are not invested and always do the bare minimum for the company.
And those who are actively disengaged are highly negative, contributing nothing. Therefore, brands that fail to engage their employees risk losing millions of dollars in productivity.
2. External Engagement
External engagement is simply the brand’s engagement with its customers. This article contains more information on how to maximize external engagement for a brand’s growth.
Ways to Drive Brand Engagement
Driving engagement to a brand is very crucial in maintaining its positioning. It is a marketing strategy that connects a business to its audience for more productivity. Some ways of increasing brand engagement are;
1. Provide Value through Blogs
The first way to win the public over to your side is by giving out value. People need answers to several questions running through their minds. This is why thought leadership will forever remain relevant.
Therefore, a brand can engage its customers by positioning itself as a thought leader. And no better way to do this than through blogs.
Regardless of the industry you’re in, you can create articles, blog posts, and guides that are relevant to your target audience. Many SaaS brands have mastered this strategy, especially since not everyone is tech-savvy. Apart from engagement, blogs can help brands to acquire quality leads.
2. Maximize Social Media
This is the second on the list because your target audience resides on social media. They might not read blog posts every hour, but they are on their favorite social media platform.
A 2022 global report by Datareportal shows that half the world now uses social media. And only 4.1% of internet users are not on social media.
Businesses must first discover where their target audience hangs out. Our earlier article on Social Media Marketing : The Basic Guide will help you discover you target audience And after that, develop creative campaigns to engage them actively. The campaigns could involve sharing ideas, information, how-to videos, infographics, success stories, etc. It could also include interactive content like surveys, Twitter polls, etc.
3. Customer Listening
Sometimes, it is crucial to listen more than you talk. And it is no different for brands as well. Listening is not just hearing. It is paying attention to what your customers say about you, their pain points, frustrations, and reviews. Customer listening is one of the surest ways to know if your business is static or sinking.
There are several customer listening tools today. Some of them are Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, BuzzSumo, Tailwind, Falcon.io, etc. And most of these tools work for scheduling, publishing, listening, and advertising your brand.
4. Entertain With Games
People love entertainment. And one way to do this is through games. However, the types of games to create depend on your target audience. You must first discover what will attract and appeal to them.
The aim of this method is to call their attention to your brand. Most times, marketers pair these games with prizes. These could be a sample of their product, buy-one-get-one-free, coupons, etc.
You can use games to drive traffic to your website where customers can further engage with the brand. They could also help you bring more leads into the sales or marketing funnel.
5. Build Communities
Brands with active communities will always remain at the top of their engagement games. And the fun part is that creating one community will lead to the emergence of others, thereby leading to a chain of loyal customers.
The most common types of communities are online forums, social media groups, and help centers. And having one, offers newly acquired customers a support group.
Furthermore, brands can schedule online or physical events, referral competitions, etc. on the forums. Some examples of brands with outstanding communities are Apple, Airbnb, Lego, and PlayStation.
6. Host Events
Events are an extraordinary means of connecting with your audience. Depending on which is readily accessible to your audience, they could be virtual or physical.
Other factors to consider when planning an event are expenses, customer benefits, and time. For instance, if your target audience comprises CEOs, it would be helpful to research the time they’re readily available. And also what they stand to gain from the event.
Apart from hosting events, you could attend other events. For example, you could request a speaking slot at a conference or reality show or a boot at a tradeshow.
7. Contests and Competitions
Big brands use this method often. And even smaller brands can tap into it. It is usually a part of a more extensive marketing campaign, and the creative director is tasked with preparing it.
A contest could be as simple as asking customers to like, comment, and share to win something. It could also include creating videos or taking photos related to your product or service.
Another common type is the hashtag contest. You only need to create a hashtag and prepare some incentives for it. The contests can be once in a while, weekly, or monthly, as you please.
8. Partnering With Influencers
People hate to be left out. And that is the exact feeling that influencers trigger. People want to try out what their favorite influencers are doing, hop on the same trends, etc.
Leveraging influencer authority can also help you to increase people’s trust in your brand. This is because most influencers have gained a reputation from their relationship with their audience over the years.
Partnering with an influencer also means outsourcing a part of your content creation. It becomes the influencer job to create unique, engaging, and relatable content about your brand.
How to Measure Brand Engagement
As with any marketing strategy, brand engagement also needs to be measured. However, a lot of marketers find it complicated. While some say it’s because KPIs are intertwined, others say there are too many channels to monitor engagement effectively. Nevertheless, here are four ways to measure engagement;
1. Monitor Bounce Rate with Google Analytics
This metric is vital for discovering people’s engagement with your website. It measures how long visitors stay and if they perform specific tasks before leaving the site.
By monitoring this, you’ll discover which areas of your landing pages to fix. This could be the content or the user experience of the site.
Measuring bounce rate is easy with Google Analytics integrated into your website. All you need to do is set indicators and visit the all traffic report to check how high or low it is.
2. Measure Customer Satisfaction Score Using Surveys
Measuring customer satisfaction can be pretty tricky. This is because the level of honesty and correct answers you’ll get differ among people.
Measuring your customer satisfaction score gives insights into how customers interact with your product or service. You could also use it to track their reaction to different features on your website.
To measure your customer satisfaction score, first, create a feedback survey. In the survey, you can ask multiple questions but be careful not to overtask your customers.
Next, place a rating scale to collect responses. Most marketers use 1-5. And finally, divide the number of satisfied customers by your total responses.
3. Measure Customer Lifetime Value
The acquisition cost per customer is always higher than the cost of retaining existing ones. Therefore, you should tailor a part of your brand engagement strategies towards strengthening the bond with the latter.
Tracking CLV is a valuable metric as it shows if you’re staying at the top of your customers’ minds or not. It also helps you to measure how much revenue they generate relative to the cost of engagement.
You must create a customer journey board to track the customer’s lifetime value. And then include all the points where the customer adds value and generates revenue for the company. Here’s a formula for calculating CLV;
Lifetime Value (LTV) = Average sale value x retention time x number of transactions
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) = LTV x profit margin.
4. Measure Net Promoter Score with Email Campaigns
Marketers use net promoter scores (NPS) to measure how well a customer would refer your brand, product, or service to others. And this is directly connected to their level of satisfaction and engagement with your brand.
First, use the above methods to boost your brand engagement for some months. Then evaluate how much loyalty your brand commands.
One of the ways to track NPS is through email campaigns. This works well if you already have an email engagement strategy. You can send a survey asking how well they’d recommend your business.
Then group your answers into three categories- promoters, passives, and detractors. Your net promoter score is the percent of promoters – the percent of detractors.
Several brands like Mastercard, Spotify, and Uber Eats have scaled with brand engagement in the past. However, this is all thanks to their brands’ consistency. One contest, competition, or event is not enough for you to excel at it. And a few pieces of scribbled posts won’t do the magic. You must create high-value content regularly and be ready for some expenses.