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So you’ve done it, you’ve made a sale. Someone found your website through your expert marketing, and now their journey with your company has reached its end. Right?
Wrong! If your customers’ interactions with your brand start and end with making a purchase, you’ll quickly find yourself buried under your competition. If you want to stay top of mind in the long-term, you need to keep them engaged with your brand.
But don’t worry, I’m here to guide you through the world of brand engagement, armed with years of experience and some stellar real-life examples. Get ready to take your brand to the next level and build lasting relationships with your customers.
What Is Brand Engagement?
Brand engagement is a broad term that refers to the level of interaction, involvement, and connection people have with a brand. You want folks to actively participate in your company’s activities, and encourage them to genuinely care about your brand as a whole.
With such an all-encompassing definition, it should come as no surprise that brand engagement can take many forms, including
- Social Media Interactions - Likes, shares, comments, and user generated content
- Customer Reviews and Testimonials - Folks willingness to leave a review and share their experience with your brand
- Loyalty Programs - Actively engaging with your loyalty program through frequent purchases, discounts used, and referrals made
- Brand Advocacy - When folks move from customers to full brand ambassadors, actively promoting and endorsing your brand
- Engaging With Events - Getting invested in events, contests, and challenges that your brand organizes
- Referrals - Talking up your brand to others, creating positive buzz, and bringing in qualified leads
- Personalised Experiences - The level of personalization in customer interactions and communication, such as addressing them by name and tailoring offers to their specific interests and needs
Ultimately, brand engagement is a measure of how connected and invested consumers are with your brand, rather than just passively using your products or services. It's about building a strong and loyal community around your brand, and creating a sense of belonging and connection.
Why Brand Engagement Is Vital
While it may seem like brand engagement will happen all on its own, there are lots of benefits to actively cultivating it and making it a core pillar of your marketing efforts.
- Customer Retention - Perhaps the most vital benefit, keeping customers engaged in your brand fosters a sense of community and belonging. This will keep them coming back to your brand for years to come
- Brand Awareness - Engaged audiences will talk about your brand with their networks, sharing experiences and spreading positive word-of-mouth
- Customer Satisfaction - When you engage with your customers, you’ll gain invaluable insight into their needs, preferences, and grievances. You can use this to tailor your customer experience to what they want
- Brand Reputation - If your brand gets lots of positive engagement, it will gain a reputation for being trustworthy, credible, and reliable
- Sustainability - When you move from being a company your customers buy from to an active part of their lives, you’ll be able to withstand market fluctuations, adapt to customer needs, and stay relevant long-term
- Customer Lifetime Value - Research shows that engaged customers will spend up to 40% more than other repeat customers
- Differentiation - With a unique and memorable customer experience that drives engagement, you can be sure your company won’t fade into the background
If you want any kind of competitive advantage or longevity in the modern market, you need to be engaging your audience in meaningful ways.
Measuring Brand Engagement
Before you can take any steps toward cultivating brand engagement, you need a way to track it. This will help you understand your current state of affairs, as well as give you insight into what works and what isn’t landing with your users.
There are several analytics tools you can use to track KPIs across social media platforms, websites, and the internet at large. Knowing which ones are right for your campaign requires you to know what metrics you’re most invested in.
- Social Media Engagement - Track likes, comments, shares, and mentions
- Website Traffic - Keep an eye on number of visitors, page views, session duration, and bounce rate
- Conversion Rate - The percentage of website visitors who make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or fill out a contact form
- Email Open and Click-Through Rates - Monitor how many people open your emails and click on the links
- Brand Sentiment - Use social listening tools and sentiment analysis to track people’s perception of your brand online
- Reviews and Ratings - How many positive reviews have you gotten across platforms like Google, Yelp, or social media
- Brand Mentions - How often is your brand brought up organically online
- K-Factor - Measure the level of viral growth and word-of-mouth marketing generated by your brand
- Time Spent on Site - How long are folks staying on your site and interacting with your content
- Repeat Purchases - Monitor the number of repeat customers and the frequency of their purchases
- Brand Awareness - Track social media followers, website visitors, and email subscribers
- Net Promoter Score - How likely are your customers to recommend you to their friends
By using a combination of these KPIs, you can focus your brand engagement efforts and put resources into channels that get the results you want. Remember, you can’t improve something you aren’t tracking.
Brand Engagement Best Practices
The concept and application of brand engagement has evolved so much over my time as a marketer, but some things stay consistent. These tips will get you on the right track no matter what kind of engagement you’re trying to foster.
Tip One: Know Your Audience
I can not stress this fact enough. No one wants to engage with something that doesn't interest them. In order to get your target market involved in your brand activities, you need to understand what motivates them.
When you know that gets your audience excited, you’ll be able to create content and campaigns that grab their attention and keep them coming back.
Tip Two: Focus on Authenticity
As a new generation of customers comes into their own, brands have to offer authenticity in order to keep their attention. Gen Z is more passionate about real connections and genuine engagement than any generation before, and if you want to get them on board with your brand, you have to have it.
Make sure you have a clear understanding of your brand’s values and build every marketing effort around them.
Tip Three: Tell Stories
You’ve likely heard it many times, effective marketing isn’t about selling a product, but a lifestyle. Make sure your target audience knows about your company’s values, and how you can solve problems for them.
Creating a mythos around the kinds of people who are engaged with your company will encourage folks to identify with your company and make it a part of their world.
Examples of Successful Brand Engagement
Brand engagement has been key to the success of some of the biggest brands around. There’s a lot to be learned from their campaigns and how they keep people coming back again and again.
Spotify: Sharable Specifics
Few brands have been able to cultivate the culture of sharing your algorithm like Spotify. With endless statistics, metrics, and personalised recommendations being presented in fun and easily shareable ways, Spotify has likely flooded your social media feed more than once.
65% of customers say that personalised experiences will keep them loyal to a company. We can see this in action with Spotify users sharing their Spotify Wrapped every year without fail. But the engagement isn’t restricted to the end of the year.
By creating 100% personalised playlists every single day and keeping their visual branding consistent and appealing, Spotify has been able to encourage organic sharing. Who doesn’t want to post their “Moody Masterpiece Tuesday Afternoon” playlist for their friends to see?
Starbucks: Ultra-Meaningful UGC
Starbucks struck engagement gold when they partnered with Mermaids for their #WhatsYourName campaign. Not only were they showing support for an important social issue, but they encouraged meaningful and engaging user-generated content.
By focusing on something that is so integral to their brand - writing names on cups - and tying it to trans acceptance, Starbucks was able to get folks to share their own stories of diversity and inclusion. Each of these posts featured the #WhatsYourName, and pointed to a fully engaged audience.
If you want your customers to create content, bringing in support for a cause they care about is an excellent motivator. Just make sure you put your money where your mouth is like Starbucks did when they sold special cookies and donated the proceeds to Mermaid.
Warby Parker: Omnichannel Operations
Moving from an advertising lens to a user experience lens, we can take a look at Warby Parker’s innovative user interface that encourages engagement both online and in the real world. Rather than keep things 100% on their website, Warby Parker makes it possible for customers to experience their product in multiple ways, in multiple places.
The process starts when customers scroll through the options for glasses lenses. This part is fairly straightforward, but gets infinitely more engaging as augmented reality is introduced. Customers can test out frames virtually to get a feel for them without ever leaving the house.
Once they’ve narrowed it down to five frames, customers can then order an at-home try on where they test out physical pairs of glasses. This makes their brand stand out, and takes them from the theoretical digital space to their customers’ front doors.
The Bottom Line
An engaged customer base is a resilient customer base. By giving your users a reason to identify with your brand and interact with it outside of sales, you’re establishing yourself as a part of their life. One that can’t easily be replaced by the next competitor that comes scrolling across their feed.
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