Tim Lloyd from The Digital Engagement Guide defines engagement as,
“Anything that involves an online interaction. Specifically, the use of digital tools to find, listen to or interact with a brand’s customers around a range of products.”
Paul Greenberg for Hubspot describes customer engagement as
“The ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.”
Our ability to engage the customer using digital media has created far more possibilities for reaching audiences. By using methods that leverage evolving technology, we make more powerful engagement techniques available at far lower costs. It is no longer a question of “Will you engage your customer online?” but how will you engage them online?
Content Development
Content development focuses on messaging and how it can be leveraged across multiple platforms, giving it the ability to maximize engagement. As customers begin to build a network of digital devices around themselves, the digital engagement must be able to connect to all digital tools seamlessly. Customers also expect digital engagement to be instant, looking to get what they want, when they want it, and however, they want it. So, the engagement process needs to be smart and agile, being able to operate in fast-moving contextual environments.
Engagement is a tool for outbound marketing, by enabling a company to promote campaigns over the web or via apps, as well as a medium for sales departments to nurture interest amongst individual customers.
Measuring Success
Vanhishikha Bhargava, a content marketer at Exit Bee, explains, “When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign, there are innumerable metrics that a marketer is expected to track – impressions, CTR, sales, etc. But the truth is, the moment this campaign ends, most of the businesses experience a downscale in each of these metrics.
The reason?
They didn’t measure the one critical metric that determines the success of a digital marketing campaign – engagement.”
In today’s competitive market, engagement is the real measure of success – be it on social media or any other digital channel.
Every customer in the target market out there has at least a hundred options when buying a product. It is essential to ensure that every time he does plan to make a purchase – even after your campaign has ended, he comes back to you. The only way you can assure this is by keeping him hooked to your brand and staying in his line of sight at all times.
How to Measure Engagement
What key performance indicators (KPI’s) you use to measure the success or failure are dependent on the goals you set.
Key Performance Indicators
Here is a sample of KPI’s you can compile for your business:
- Web traffic sources
- Brand awareness
- Cost per lead
- Website traffic leads
- Returning visitors
- Online conversion rates
- Lead conversion rates
- Click thru rate
- Customer lifetime value
The problem with mounds of data is exactly that; it’s mounds of data. The data should supply you with KPI’s that correlate to your goals.
For example, you need to sell 20 hearing aids per month to meet your financial goals. Given your closure ratio of 80%, you know you need 12 patients coming into your office each month to achieve those goals. You would like to attract 8 of those patients from online marketing. Your goal is eight new patient leads per month from online marketing. An additional goal would be your cost per lead. Your marketing budget is not unlimited, nor can it be unrealistic. We’d all like to spend $20 and generate eight leads, but that isn’t realistic. We would suggest basing the CPL on the industry standard. Current CPL for Audiology practices ranges from $350 – $500 per lead.
So far we’ve established two goals that we can measure based KPI’s:
- Generate eight leads per month
- Keep the cost per lead to under $500
Here are a few other goals that can be defined and measured
Increase social media followers:
- An increase in social media followers is an increase in organic (aka, free) impressions on everything you post. A growing audience means an increased chance for free engagement including shares, likes, and comments. Shares increase your brand awareness and can grow your audience circle. When an audience member shares a post or event you have posted, it is now viewable to their friend spheres who usually have something or many things in common with the person who shared the post. Shares also add a layer of trust. It is a free endorsement of your practice and brand. Increased likes and comments signal to Facebook’s algorithms that your Facebook page is putting out content that your audience likes and is finding useful or engaging. The shares push your content up in relevance to similar audiences and creates more automatic recommendations by Facebook for these audiences to follow your page. More social media followers may seem like a vain goal, but increased followers means increased engagement, which creates exponential results.
Increase traffic to your website:
- Increased website traffic allows us to pull more audience analytics and gives us more data about what users are doing when they visit your site. The increase in web traffic will enable us to create content marketing with increased relevance to your practice’s specific audience. Additionally, it allows us to develop specialized content funnels that work with how users use your website to gently guide them where we ultimately want them to end up (contacting you). Increased traffic to your website also means more eyes on your brand, and if you are using retargeting, your brand can now follow that interested party into other spaces on the web. The result? You have cultivated a broader audience with frequent, automatic brand awareness, just from a visit to your site.
Increase ad impressions:
- Increased ad impressions increases ad engagement and results. The more your ad is seen, the more chances for clicks, lead generation, and calls. Increases in ad impressions also increase our data on what devices, platforms, times, locations, ad copy, and creatives are working and which are not. This information helps us to modify our plan toward what is working for your practice.
How Does Engagement Impact Growth?
The engagement rate customers have with you impact the growth of your business by manifolds. If you focus on adding value to them consistently, they are more likely to stay around longer. The longer you can hold on to a customer, the greater number of opportunities you will get to generate more revenue and get introduced into their circles – acquiring more leads, that you can turn into customers.
