May 17, 2018
When people are emotionally connected to your brand, they become highly engaged and buy more. It’s that simple. In fact, a fully-engaged customer represents 23% more revenue than average. But it also goes a little deeper than just finance. Brand engagement is important for a variety of reasons. Here’s just a few:
It starts with people becoming aware of your brand. Digital marketing is a multi-channel modern venture and you must be able to engage with people on a multitude of levels.
There are a variety of ways you can connect with your audience to build brand awareness. This can include:
The idea is to draw people in with a diversity of tactics. The best ways to build brand awareness is to engage and talk to people. Brand engagement is so important because it’s the first thing to create a culture for your company.
Once people are aware of your brand, engaging them further will build loyalty. People will begin subscribing to your social streams and commenting on your messages. Customers start to become repeat and the further you engage them, the faster that happens.
The more genuine and transparent you are about your brand engagement, the higher the loyalty. A 2016 survey found that 94% of all consumers are more likely to be loyal to a brand when it commits to full transparency. Moreover, 80% of consumers said “authenticity of content” is the most influential factor in their decision to become a follower of a brand. So, you get the picture!
This is the golden goose of brand engagement. At this point, you start to create advocacy. These people are your best marketers out there. They function by “word-of-mouth.” Brand advocates are customers that have been so thoroughly engaged with your brand, they now advocate about it consistently to other people.
Not only do advocates tell people about their purchases twice as much as non-advocates, customers referred by advocates have a 37% higher retention rate. So, once you get to where consumers are working for you for free because they love your brand so much, you know you’ve truly been successful at engaging them.
If you’re shaking your head on how to begin this process or who your audience will be, you’re not alone. Here are a few simple things you can do to know who your people are:
There are a variety of tools online, like Social Sprout and Google Alerts, that can help you monitor all of your channels online, to determine who is talking about your brand. This can sort of act like a compass to point you in the right direction. Once you have the necessary data, you’ll know where to focus your efforts—which is less risk, and more moola.
This is the number one path the beginning brand engagement. Afterall, brand engagement is simply about entertaining people while building awareness about who you are. The more quality content you produce and give to the people, the more they will follow what you’re doing. It makes perfect sense.
Engaging your customers will, of course, make you more money but it’s truly about building a community around your brand. This leads to a culture for your company that people recognize and relate to. Once they get to the stage of brand advocacy, you know you’ve succeeded with the imagination you’ve offered the public.
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