Engagement Marketing is all about building relationships with your customers. Engagement marketing strategy engages customers directly. It encourages and invites customers to participate in the evolution of their brand or brand experience. It is known when brand and customer connect. Engagement marketing believes that customers should be actively involved in the co-creation of marketing programs rather than looking at them only like material for receiving messages. Customers are the people who will make money for you. So valuing them is to value your business. They are directly proportional to your profit and revenue.

 

Engagement marketing is about making sure customers that you care about them on every step of their journey. Engagement marketing is also known as experiential marketing, event marketing, participation marketing, on-ground marketing, and live-marketing. It is like the live, one-to-one interactions with the customers that allow creating longer and strong relationships with your brands.

Process of Engagement Marketing

Visibility
Visibility means getting noticed. It’s not about anyone but the right ones. This is all about Persona Development.
1-Creating your personas
2-Finding where they visit and
3-Knowing what they are looking for

You will reach your target audience and will capture the people who want to know about you.

The Tools Required
Attribute Model
Buyer Personas
KPI’s
Inbound & Outbound Marketing

 

Attraction
It is the first customer’s interaction with you. The difference between visibility and attraction is creating useful content that attracts them. Your content should be relevant, valuable and educational that will make the visitors click on them and your links. Write about things that address a persona’s desires and help their situation.

Tools Required
Persona Reach
Personalized Content
Content Marketing Strategy
Attraction Score (Demographic and Firmographic)

 

Interest
Interest is the velocity of Attraction. Or you can call it for a ‘second look’. After the first download, read, click or comment don’t let your customers leave.You are not done with or part by just showing them the first look. Your job should be more rather than just one e-book, blog, infographic, image or video. Use strategies and persona specific nurturing journeys to keep them engaged. Creating a website is easy but engaging your customers so that they keep on coming back is your job.

Tools Required
Helpful Content
Customer Control
Compelling personal stories
Marketing Automation

 

Relationship
Now as you get the face-to-face interaction that can be either online or offline, you can now put that face or voice behind that name. Welcome to CRM now. With sales and marketing combined, you can increase your productivity and can create a seamless & happy customer journey.

Tools Required
Sales plus Marketing (SLA) Process
MQL
SQL
Persona’s Sales Process
Requirements for Qualification (BANT)
Sales funnel definition
CRM

 

Commitment
The commitment is when customers make the final buy. Now keeping your customers engage and happy is your job. Listen, support and do everything that they need for customer service. Just keep them happy for long-term-relationship with you.

Tools Required
Customer Surveys & Feedback
KPI’s
Usage and Adoption Analytics
ANything to meet customer’s needs

 

Growth
It’s the process of making your customers like your brand advocates. Your customers should promote everything about you with their peers and friends online and offline. Most companies overlook this step as they don’t feel it necessary but it plays an essential part of your growth journey. Customer service and satisfaction is the key part. Be sure in this part to fulfill all their desires and go beyond their expectations then only you can see the growth of your business.

Tools Required
Communities and Reviews
Marketing Expansion
Outline of existing buyer personas and segmentation

 

 

Continuous engagement programs which include:

Loyalty Programs
Check-Ins
Birthday Celebrations
Campaigns

 

Engagement Marketing Strategies

There are many strategies. Let’s discuss some of them.

Love your Customers
Engage your customers first and then think about your product. Customers are the pillars of your business no matter what your business type. If your customers are not valued and motivated, then they will switch to your competitors without any second thought.

How Would Customers respond to positive customer service?

 

They will tell their friends and peers online about the experience and your brand.
They will write a positive review for you.
They will sign up for your loyalty scheme.
They will keep on renewing or upgrading your products/services even if it is not cheap.
They will keep on speaking with your company more frequently by feedback.
They will talk about the experience and your products and services in social media.

 

Use Social Media as an Engagement Tool not simply as a Platform
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are the social media networks that are not only meant for connecting with people. If you want better results, then use them as your engagement tool. Increasing followers in social media channels will directly impact your audience growth and loyalty. The total worldwide population is 7.3 billion and so with social media. It’s very huge that about 2.3 billion people are active on social media. So it is the most critical tool for you that can help greatly in engaging them. You can retain and make happy customers through customer engagement.

 

Engage Customers with In-Product Messaging
When it’s about notifying your customers about your new product, you should use several key channels that are as below:

In-Product Messaging
Email
Mobile
Social Media
Customer Care/Support

In-Product Messaging channel is the best among all the above channels because that’s what your intimate customers are looking for. Here is an image of an in-product messaging by zendesk.

 

When you send targeted messages to a segment of your users, you are going to get higher engagement rates. In the case of email, you should first segment your email list to avoid sending the same emails again to everyone. In-Product messaging is the best viable strategy to adopt as it’s the direct correlation between product and market. You will not find all CRM software with the In-Product messaging feature, but you can find any then grab it because lots of companies out there believe that you can leverage in-product messaging technique to move new customers through the onboarding process while sending an email to engage customers who are still stuck on a step.

 

Nurture Free Trial Prospects and get them to Upgrade
It’s very easy to attract free trial users or prospects and to overwhelm them when they first sign up for your new service. But Making them upgrade your service is the hardest part. That’s the part where your main focus should be. Start your journey by attracting free trial customers then check how these free trial customers are responding to your marketing messages and then make them stay long with your service.

 

“Converting free trial customers to paying customers should be your goal”. You have to nurture them to pay for your premium features. Personalized communication is the best way to grab it. Here is an example of a free trial prospect. It’s easier to know your customers if you let them know you,” says Belle Beth Cooper. It will help your free trial customers to know you by your name so will give a secured feeling for your brand.

 

Communicate with VIP Customers with Promotions and Offers
VIP customers are the customers who are loyal to you and have faith in you. They are the one who has been with you for a long time, purchasing your product, promoting you, referring you to their friends and fans to your business. Keeping them happy is keeping your business up and running. Remember to give frequent offers and promotions to your VIP Customers. Invite them to your live events and one-to-one interaction and coaching programs. You need to get closer to them. Apple treated Dang Sung as one of their VIP customers after he spent £12,000 for an Apple Watch Edition with 18-Carat Yellow Gold Case with Black Classic Buckle.

 

There are three types of VIP customers:
Community VIP Customers:
They are an important group. They are not the big spenders but refer qualified customers. Pro bloggers and social media influencers are your community VIP customers.When they retweet your post or new product, you can expect new subscribers and buyers in your list.

Liberal VIP customers:
They are loyal to your brand. They purchase the most over a period.

Advocates VIP Customers:
They make an impact on your brand. They are big spenders as well as your brand advocates. They are happy with your product and even tell others to buy your product. If you have taken for granted these very important customers than you are putting your business at risk and you are going to lose them soon.

 

Deliver Enormous Value to your customer to make them Obsess
Obsess over your customers, not over your competitors. Amazon always keeps their overall customer satisfaction on top chart among America’s largest companies.Amazon is number 1 shopping site because it believes in customer-centricity. Go the extra mile to answer customers’ questions and address them properly and keep a look and address the complaints too. No matter if you have a niche or a market you should nurture your brand advocates always.

 

Create Custom Contents that addresses a Bugging Customer Question-
Content marketing is the most important strategy to engage your customers. Keep on updating your contents on your site. It drives leads and acquires new customers. Whereas custom content is used to engage existing customers. That’s the difference between content marketing and custom content marketing. It’s very important to create useful content for your customers. Top brands such as HubSpot, KISSmetrics, Moz, Search Engine Journal, QuickSprouthave mastered the art of using content to engage and inspire their customers.

 

Custom content is the future of marketing. About 61% of buyers’ decisions are influenced by custom contents. If you have a large customer base like Shopify, Moz, etc., you can’t address each customer separately. Custom content marketing is the easiest way to address this.You can create it to let your customer know about your new features or how to install and set up your software or feature.

 

Hold a Customer-Engagement Summit
There are many ways to get information like blogs, articles, books, newspapers, journals, magazines, videos, podcasts and multimedia. But a summit or a conference can dramatically widen your learning curve. According to the Academic Association of Contemporary European Studies, “When you attend conferences, you got to learn from others and can improve your skills and knowledge in your field more drastically and dramatically.” Summit or a conference gives you the opportunity to meet your customers face-to-face, especially with your VIP customers. This makes a lot of difference, and you can stand out of the crowd.

 

Interactive Content to feed Customer’s Demand
Interactive content is an effective approach to educate your customers. When customers are educated, they become engaged and actions specifically. When it’s about online, Content is the king. Your ability to produce the right content is your key to generate more leads, more inbound links, and more sales.

 

Content is not about its quantity now; it’s about the quality that it holds. “Interactive content,” is the type of content that talks back to the reader. In other words, interaction goes on when readers go through it. A typical blog post is not an interactive content, but it can become if you spice it up. Spice it up with graphs, infographics, images, videos, presentations, etc. Interactive content is what engages the users and provides the large values.

 

Conclusion
Engagement marketing is crucial for the survival of your brand and service. If you are engaging audiences then, you are endangering your brand. If you want it then, be conversational and leave room for your audiences so that they can add their voice. Give your customers a consistent and exceptional experience, and you will be rewarded with their trust and loyalty.