What's new about online engagement? What distinguishes it from traditional advertising or promotion? Here are tips for turning your next strategy into a success.
Engagement is the hot topic at any interactive marketing gathering these days. We want to know how to do it, how to measure it and how to get the highest return on our investment in it. Engagement describes the heart of the interactive marketing value proposition: a brand's ability to have a conversation with its consumers.
Increasingly, engagement marketing, and therefore interactive marketing, is at the heart of an integrated marketing strategy. Engagement, however, is not an event (a singular moment during which the stars align and the brand and consumer become one), nor is it the ultimate goal of a marketing program. Engagement is better thought of as a cycle, a series of touchpoints designed to create engagement with a brand in order to drive a purchase -- or some similarly desirable action -- over and over again, each time in a more meaningful and valuable way to both brand and consumer. Too often, we marketers focus on the sexy, creative part of the process and lose sight of the bottom line.
The touchpoints of an engagement cycle can be described as Awareness, Recruitment, Engagement, Motivation, and Purchase (or Action). Throughout the cycle, marketers must measure and learn in order to add value to the next turn through the cycle.
Promotions play a prominent role in the engagement cycle and in integrated marketing campaigns because they excel at moving consumers from one touchpoint to the next, and they offer ample opportunity for direct measurement and learning. They further brand marketing goals: identify customers, segment customers, learn about the segments, tailor products based on feedback and target differentiated products appropriately.
What's new about an online engagement cycle? What distinguishes it from traditional advertising or promotion? Two key elements: it can create true two-way conversations on a mass scale, and it can provide real value to both parties.
These elements have been possible but impractical in the past; focus groups and surveys provided proxies for actual engagement on a broad scale. The internet makes real one-to-one engagement possible today, and while the focal point of promotional engagement (and "integrated marketing") is often an offline purchase, it is increasingly rare not to include an online component, to create conversations on a large scale.
Let's examine each touchpoint and how promotions drive the cycle: