Engagement. This has been the keyword in the marketing world for some time.
In the Digital Marketing context, the term refers to how consumers interact directly with the brand through different actions, such as clicks, likes, comments, and shares.
This is important not only to increase the company’s reach and relevance in the Internet scenario but also to facilitate the creation of profitable relationships.
The more engaging your brand experiences are, the higher the lead conversion rate is.
Therefore, it is essential to rely on strategies focused on stimulating this kind of behavior in the audience — and that’s where Engagement Marketing comes in.
You don’t know what it means or wants to learn how to apply the concept in your business? In this post, we will cover:
- What is Engagement Marketing?
- What benefits does it provide?
- How can this strategy be applied in your business?
- What tools can be used in this strategy?
Shall we?
What is Engagement Marketing?
Engagement Marketing encloses techniques, strategies, and practices focused on boosting audience participation, providing the appropriate scenario for building a good relationship with leads, customers, and users.
To understand the relevance of all this, it is necessary to understand consumer 4.0, a dominant profile in the modern market.
Concerned with the quality of the buying journey and enjoying great access to information, this group gives preference to brands that provide qualified experiences, in which their participation is active.
It is a phenomenon that results from the connectivity reached by digital transformation, which has allowed clients to connect directly with brands using the internet.
As Digital Marketing is an extremely competitive environment, the companies that manage to be more effective in this relationship are ahead of the others.
If a customer engages with your content, it paves the way for you to guide them towards the purchase decision.
What benefits does it provide?
In the previous paragraph, we made clear that applying a good Engagement Marketing strategy eventually results in increased sales.
However, this is the objective you should have in the long term, and, to reach it, you must consider the most immediate advantages.
Think, for example, about your digital strategy as a whole. Either to generate leads or to close sales, it is important to count on an attractive website and a high degree of authority. And engagement plays a key role in this process.
If you employ a good SEO strategy and thus attract users to your portal, you must ensure that they are interested in the experience.
A poor website, without incentives for engagement, tends to drive visitors away and raise the bounce rate.
However, if your approach allows for visitor engagement, the visitor will likely spend more time on the site, visiting several pages and getting to know your brand better.
This can be the initial step for the user to start consuming your content, become a lead, enter a nurturing process, and convert.
However, the engagement on the internet is not just about your website, much less closing sales. Check the other advantages below!
Increases brand authority
If your company works with a Content Marketing strategy, you know the challenge of positioning your blog among the first results of SERPs.
To pursue this goal, it is essential to use SEO techniques to please Google’s algorithm, which establishes the ranking through various criteria.
One of them is the domain’s authority, which is determined by a series of factors such as external links, accesses, and traffic volume.
Thus, by focusing on lead engagement, you create a mechanism that increases your domain’s authority, raising your position in the ranking.
For this to work, you need to motivate engagement on all channels. Linking your site to social media, for example, is a good way to generate authority.
Generates knowledge about the persona
You already know what a buyer persona is, right? It is a semi-fictitious profile used to represent your ideal consumer and serve as a basis for implementing communication and marketing strategies. Naturally, therefore, it is necessary to know in-depth the characteristics of your target audience.
When a visitor engages with your content, they open a two-way dialogue. After all, by taking such action, they generate valuable insights into their behavior.
So, think about your social media. The number of likes and shares in each of your posts clearly indicates the preferences of the followers. If your videos are more successful than the images, for example, this indicates that the public prefers this type of content.
It is also possible to extract more specific information. Many strategies involve the use of interactive content, such as quizzes and polls, which are excellent for testing the level of knowledge of the audience and defining their positioning in the sales funnel.
Enables strategy optimization
The natural result of understanding your buyer persona is the optimization of your strategy.
The more data you gather about your audience, the more effective your campaigns will be on all channels. Think about an email marketing approach, for example.
If you insert links in your messages, you can measure which campaigns receive the most clicks. From this, you can apply A/B tests to define which elements are most effective in attracting public attention. Then, you just have to make adjustments to increase the success rate.
Increases, organically, the reach of the brand
Many people still think about Digital Marketing as if it involved a large investment in ads. But strategies like Inbound Marketing prove that this is not the reality.
If you get good engagement rates, it will increase your channels’ reach and relevance in a completely organic way.
And this is not just about the positive ranking that can be achieved in search engines; engaged consumers often share positive experiences with others, generating more business opportunities for your company.
How can this strategy be applied in your business?
Well, now that you know the advantages of Engagement Marketing, you must be wondering how to access them in your business.
As with any type of strategy, your success depends on a strategic approach, in addition to a continuous optimization plan.
Below, check out some tips that can help in this application process.
Customize the experience
With so much technology at our disposal, customizing the customer experience is an increasingly accessible task.
Personalized service is fundamental to get closer to the consumer and establish certain credibility for your brand. When this happens, engagement is a consequence.
Therefore, focus on the segmentation of your audience. This way, it is possible to trigger more effective campaigns and messages, using elements that fully answer your persona’s needs.
Invest in Content Marketing
Investing in Content Marketing is critical to getting the engagement rate you want for your brand.
This is because the strategy involves a complete approach to the most relevant channels in the digital environment, enabling you to offer content that can attract, engage, and convert the audience.
Content Marketing is based on SEO practices, and the production of quality materials for each sales funnel phase.
From this, you can establish quality dialogues with the audience, understanding and solving their main problems.
To maximize engagement, work with CTA buttons, the famous calls-to-action. They encourage the consumer to perform certain actions and increase the time visitors spend on your company’s channels.
If the strategy enhances the level of audience engagement in the medium term, in the bigger picture, it consolidates your brand as an authority in the market.
Consider Interactive Marketing
Interaction Marketing focuses on the use of interactivity as a central component of content production. Interactive content has much higher engagement rates than static content, as it facilitates and motivates user participation.
Therefore, seek to understand your audience’s characteristics to define how to implement this interactivity. Several formats can be used, and, in many cases, it is even possible to convert your static materials into interactive.
A common example involves ebooks. Do you have a complete guide that generates a positive reaction in the audience?
Using a specialized tool, such as Ion Interactive, you can turn it into an interactive page, making it easier for readers to navigate and engage.
Pay attention to feedback and measure results
Throughout the process, it is essential to be guided by relevant analyses and insights. Remember that the strategy is only successful if it can effectively satisfy consumers. Therefore, pay attention to what they have to say.
A good idea is to generate engagement in a way that stimulates feedback from the audience. You can do this through social media messages, opinion polls, and a variety of other resources.
For example, Instagram’s Stories offer a question box, which you can use to listen to what the followers have to say.
In addition to paying attention to the public reaction, it is important to base your analysis on data.
Collecting and evaluating information about the performance of your content and approaches is the only way to determine if the strategy can improve, in addition to figuring out how to do it.
What tools can be used in this strategy?
Finally, let’s talk about the tools you can use to successfully apply Engagement Marketing!
And it is impossible to do this without talking about social media. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are powerful allies for engaging your consumers.
So, if you’re not yet present on social media, you’re missing out on exploring the full potential of the internet.
Instagram, for example, has over one billion active users per month and reports that 90% of its users follow at least one business profile.
With so much scope in hand, it is enough to invest in good practices to generate engagement, especially because the social networks themselves provide resources for this purpose.
On Twitter, for example, it is possible to launch surveys, which can be answered by the public with a simple click. This is an easy and quick way to obtain targeted information, which you can use as you wish.
But when we talk about engagement, Instagram is what really stands out. Besides sharing, liking, and commenting on posts, users can interact with you in several other ways, usually made available by resources found on Instagram Stories.
Polls, GIFs, question boxes, hashtags, challenges, countdown counts, tests: all these are examples of excellent features to engage the audience and increase their satisfaction with the experience.
Other channels of communication
Although social networks are indispensable, you must adopt an omnichannel approach, i.e., spread over several channels. This way, your brand can meet the wider public’s demands and be more accessible to the entire audience.
WhatsApp, for example, is becoming a fundamental tool, especially in the scenario of social isolation that is shaping up the year 2020.
The application is extremely common in citizens’ daily lives from many countries, like Brazil. Therefore, it should serve as a bridge between their brand and consumers.
It is interesting to build a broadcast list, as long as you include only really relevant information in your messages.
Overloading your contacts with too many messages can do the opposite effect and weigh negatively on your brand image. It is possible to create your list in two clicks, as indicated below:
Engagement Marketing is an indispensable strategy for any brand inserted in the digital environment. By engaging your audience, you open space to establish a relationship of trust, which reflects in more positive results. Besides, the approach can generate unique and valuable insights.
Do you want to know how to fit an Engagement Marketing strategy into the reality of your company? Request a free Ion demo and see for yourself how to differentiate your content and boost your engagement rates!
