Hey, I’m Michael Culp, a blog owner, and a Business Master’s Student. Today, I’m going to teach you what engagement in marketing is and why it’s important.
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What is Engagement?
According to the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), engagement is the manifestation of customer behavior towards a brand or company, which goes beyond the purchase, resulting in motivational drivers.
Scientific research shows that there are 3 types of engagement: active engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement.
● Active engagement is the effort and time spent interacting with a brand.
● Emotional engagement is the degree to which the users feel positive about the brand.
● Cognitive engagement is the degree to which the users think about the brand.
In simple words, engagement is the relationship and interaction between customers and brands. Engagement is always related to the customer taking an action. This action can be anything, such as a click, a comment, time on page, bounce rate, conversions…
A very common and effective strategy to increase engagement is content marketing and content promotion.
Now that you know what engagement is, let’s dive into the benefits.
1 – Builds Strong Emotional Connection
Building real relationships with customers is critical to success. It will improve your marketing, your sales, and your business overall. Emotionally connected customers will pay more attention to what you are doing and will follow your advice because you’re a trusted resource to them.
2 – Increase Repurchase Intention
Repurchase intention is the loyalty of a customer that is reflected in his intention to buy a product from the same brand repeatedly. It’s well known in marketing that it’s easy to sell to customers who already bought from you.
Usually, when businesses want to increase revenue, the first place they focus is on acquiring new customers. That’s not the best strategy, because new customers cost 5 times more to acquire.
3 – Increase Referrals
Engaged customers are loyal customers and they not only show their loyalty by purchasing several times, but by acting as brand advocates. As they had such a great experience with your business, they will happily spread the word about you.
The most likely person to know someone who also needs your products or service is your existing client. So, referrals are a very powerful way to gain new customers for your business. A referral is so powerful because the lead you get is not cold because you both know the client who made the connection.
Another cool way is to leverage other people’s audiences through affiliate marketing, where you partner up with a person who will promote your product or service to their audience in exchange for a commission. If you want to learn affiliate marketing, I recommend that you take a look at my review of John Crestani’s course.
4 – Increases Brand Authority
Brand authority is the trust a brand inspires among customers, by being an expert in a particular area of service. Engagement is a great way to increase perceived brand authority.
By being an authority you get a lot of advantages. It differentiates you from the competition, increases consumer trust, attracts the attention of influencers, accumulates natural backlinks, and improves conversion rate.
5 – Generates Golden Information About Your Target Market
In the digital marketing world, it’s very common to hear “you can’t be everything to everybody”. You are used to listening to people saying that your product or service should be designed for a specific target audience.
By increasing engagement with your market, you’ll gain key information to maximize time and resources, build new products, hit optimal price points, and hit purchase triggers.
6 – Enables Optimization
Business process optimization is crucial for your brand’s lasting success and competitiveness and engagement allows you to see what type of content and what type of business activities generate the best actions from the customers.
The most obvious benefit of optimization is that it can improve your company’s efficiency. Inefficiency results in wasted time and resources, which hinder your profits and increase stress. To achieve competitive advantage is very important to be efficient, and to be efficient you need to be always optimizing and improving.
7 – Increases The Organic Reach Of Your Brand
Organic reach is basically any form of marketing that is not paid. It’s the number of people who view your content without any paid distribution. The main benefit of organic reach is that you are getting more eyeballs on your brand without having to spend money.
Two great marketing platforms that will help you increase the organic reach of your brand are Groovefunnels and Clickfunnels.
Engagement increases the organic reach because engaged users tend to share a lot of their favorite brands’ content on their social media, therefore, putting your content in front of a lot of new eyes. You also get more organic reach because good engagement rates will increase your channel’s reach and relevance.
This will help you increase your brand awareness that’s crucial for business success. Brand awareness helps people understand, recall and become comfortable with your offers, which will increase sales.
CONCLUSION
In this article, you learned that engagement is the relationship and interaction between customers and brands and the main benefits are:
- Build strong emotional connections.
- Increase repurchase intention.
- Increase referrals.
- Increases brand authority.
- Generate golden information about your target market.
- Enables optimization.
- Increases the organic reach of your brand.
AUTHOR BIO
Michael Culp is a Business Master’s Student and founder at ambitionyard.com. He is a business enthusiast and on his site, he teaches the best ways to make money online.