Brand engagement is one of those business buzzwords that’s often neglected or misunderstood by business owners. However, this concept is incredibly important for your business. Here’s everything you need to know about brand engagement and how you can improve it for your business:
What Is Brand Engagement?
Brand engagement describes the relationship between a brand and its customers based on past, present, and future interactions. Brand engagement also involves the customer’s overall perception of a brand based on these interactions.
Furthermore, brand engagement signifies an emotional commitment to a brand that establishes trust and loyalty. This should be a key marketing goal for any brand looking to grow and succeed.
How Does Brand Engagement Differ From Brand Awareness?
Many people confuse brand engagement with brand awareness. And while both of these terms relate to brand marketing, there are some key differences that you need to keep in mind.
Essentially brand awareness is the first step in brand marketing. This step is where you establish name recognition within your target customer group. Brand awareness is important because consumers are unlikely to purchase from a brand they have never heard of and know nothing about.
Instead, you need to build up your reputation to make consumers feel more comfortable with purchasing from you.
On the other hand, brand engagement occurs after you have already established brand awareness. People are already aware of your brand, but you need to establish a meaningful connection with these individuals further. You do this through strategic and targeted brand engagement tactics.
What Are Some Different Types of Brand Engagement?
So far, we’ve gone over the basic definitions and ideas surrounding brand engagement.
However, it’s always helpful to discuss some concrete examples to understand better what the term actually means in practice. That being said, here are some different types of brand engagement:
- People liking, commenting and reacting to your posts on social media
- People subscribing to your business newsletter or email marketing list
- People signing up for your brand loyalty program
- People visiting your website and browsing your products
- People leaving reviews and recommendations for your brand
Why Does Brand Engagement Matter for Your Business?
Business owners seem to have a never-ending list of concepts and metrics that they should care about. So what makes brand engagement worth adding to that list? Here are some reasons why brand engagement matters for your business:
1. Build an Online Following
Prioritizing brand engagement helps you build an online following. Since the overall goal of brand engagement is to build a community, you learn how to do this online through social media, messengers, and email campaigns. After all, the more followers you have, the more potential customers you have!
2. Boost Customer Retention and Loyalty
Focusing on brand engagement helps you boost customer retention and loyalty. Your work isn’t over when you convert a customer. Instead, you can use brand engagement to retain customers and save money on expensive customer acquisition costs. By staying top of mind with your customers, you can encourage repeat purchases, referrals, reviews, etc.
3. Increase Sales
Investing in brand engagement helps you increase sales. When you have more loyal customers, they are more likely to purchase from your brand again and again — which is more money in your pocket.
Just remember that whatever you invest in brand engagement can be returned in terms of increased sales.
4. Improve Your Products, Services, and Overall Business
Finally, brand engagement can help you improve your products, services, and overall business. When you have a relationship with your customers, they share valuable feedback that you can then use to make meaningful changes.
So instead of struggling down the wrong path, you can have your customers backing you up and guiding you towards success.
How to Measure Your Business’ Brand Engagement?
Clearly, brand engagement is valuable — but how do you actually measure it? Depending on the avenues of brand engagement you choose to focus on, you can use various key performance indicators or KPIs to measure and track your brand engagement efforts and results.
For instance, if you’re focusing on social media engagement, then you can use metrics like impressions, shares, likes, comments, mentions, etc., to measure your brand engagement. On the other hand, if you’re focusing on building your email marketing list, then you can use metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversions.
No matter which areas you choose to focus on, make sure that you determine these KPIs ahead of time so that you can carefully and consistently track them along the way. If any indicator seems to be underperforming, you can investigate the cause and take action for a more successful brand engagement strategy.
How to Improve Brand Engagement for Your Business?
In order to achieve a successful brand engagement strategy, here are some different tactics that you can employ:
1. Host Giveaways and Contests
You can incentivize brand engagement with things like giveaways and contests. Giveaways don’t have to be expensive in order to be effective. It can be as simple as a free product or service. On the other hand, contests can be used to gather valuable user-generated content that you can then repurpose towards your broader brand engagement strategy.
2. Offer Discount Codes
Another way to incentivize brand engagement is to offer discount codes. A popular way to do this is to give customers a certain percentage off of their offer when they subscribe to your email marketing list.
When you make it seem like a mutually beneficial interaction, customers will be more likely to respond positively.
3. Host Events
You can take brand engagement to the next level with your events. In our online world, there are so many ways that you can do this. For instance, offer a discount code to those who watch your live feed. If you’re having an in-person event, you can still incorporate technology to boost engagement through things like polls, surveys, giveaways, etc.
4. Collect Feedback
People like giving feedback, especially if they are incentivized to do so. Again, you can make customer satisfaction surveys a mutually beneficial interaction by providing them a coupon off their next purchase in exchange for their input.
The information that you gain from customer feedback will be way worth the costs of the coupons.
5. Get Personal
The last way to improve brand engagement is to get personal. After all, you’re trying to build a relationship here — you should at least know your customers’ names. So make sure to gather relevant information about your audience, like their names, locations, interests, etc., to then use this information to promote more meaningful interactions in the future. As a result, customers won’t feel like they’re just a number to your brand — they will feel truly valued.
Final Thoughts on Brand Engagement
A lot of work goes into implementing a successful brand engagement strategy. If you want expert assistance in this area, you should reach out to Greg Gillman. Greg specializes in digital marketing to help brands grow awareness, engagement, and of course, conversions. So reach out today to learn more about what he can do for your business.
Sources:
7 Misconceptions About Brand Engagement That Derail Digital Campaigns | Entrepreneur
To Convert More Customers, Focus on Brand Awareness | Forbes
Scale Your Company by Leveraging Your Customer Feedback | Inc.com
