What Does All This Talk About Engagement Mean to Marketers?

How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness in the Virtual World and Finding the Value in the Real World

How does one measure the value of engagement, trust and building the right relationships with your online audience? The Internet has far greater value and measurement available. Yet, how do we define the right metrics that make sense for marketers to validate their worth and provide them with information that is useful to share with other executives.

• Is it really just about the ROI?
• Why is it that marketers want to evaluate engagement across their brands?
• What tools are available today in the marketplace to define the level of engagement?
• How can we align our strategy for the future?

Measuring engagement across one’s products and services is the magic question for many these days. As more technology is developed, it allows greater use for executives to review the data in hopes to take away insights to make improvements to their products and services. When analyzing the level of one’s engagement it’s important to marry both the quantitative and qualitative data, in order to gain a better understanding of the audience, as well as different types of usage across one’s products and services.

Every marketer defines in their own eyes a level of engagement with their customers. For some it maybe brand awareness, for others, it maybe how many people recommend their services. The Net Promoter Score  is a way to determine the value of marketing spend. How do we satisfy all the different types of goals for marketers and define what is an engagement index for measuring the effectiveness of one’s marketing efforts?

When evaluating click-thrus, it is a concern, because someone that clicks often on a particular page or decides to go deeper into the website, doesn’t necessarily really mean that individual is really engaged with your website. Perhaps this could be evidence of the individual having a difficult time to find what he/she had the intent to seek. One could go to your site with the hopes to learn more, but it’s important to realize the value of engagement should be measured on what warrants a person to come back and learn more (Retention). It’s important to identify where discovery had occurred and what keeps he/she coming back.

It’s funny how hard the online world is trying to replicate the real world and bring more people together and services through technology. People have gained skills in SEO to attract the search engines, experts have coached others how to craft email campaigns and subject lines to be viewed properly by email service providers, at the same time, we’ve tried our best to add the human element to this type of communication by personalizing the messages to drive actions. In essence people are craving engagement and connections with others and/or products as they have done so well in the real world trying to replicate a portion of that experience online. I believe that companies that can find the appropriate balance between the real world and the virtual world, that combine and understand how to best analyze the information gathered from these two worlds (the quantitative and qualitative) will best engage their audiences. It’s important for marketers to recognize those people online that take action with their product and/or service, use the data to make better analysis and reach out to those audiences through virtual means (social communities, links to blogs, partnerships, etc.), as well as traditional means of contact (interviews, phone calls, attending events etc.) to drive further engagement.

Other Thoughts on this Topic:
Ron Shevlin’s Marketing Whims
WebAnalyticsDemystified.com
Brian Haven’s Blog
Peter Kim’s Blog: A Framework For Measuring Social Media
Todd Defren’s PRSquared