Emotion is a powerful driver of decisions. You’ve probably experienced the struggle to listen to reason over emotion, and yet experts claim that subconscious emotion drives nearly every decision you make. For marketing teams, this means that appealing to an audience’s emotions is more than half the battle. Brand engagement focuses on creating a positive emotional connection between an audience and a brand, laying the foundation for a fruitful relationship.
What is brand engagement?
Brand engagement is a strategy to build up relationships between your brand and your customers. Depending on the context, it can refer to a psychological process, a marketing process, or a marketing outcome. Here’s an overview:
- As a psychological process. In marketing theory, brand engagement is the psychological process of forming a strong emotional bond with a brand.
- As a marketing process. Brand engagement can also refer to the process of encouraging target audiences to form emotional connections with brands, often as part of a larger brand management strategy.
- As a marketing outcome. Brand engagement is also a performance measurement that describes the quality of the relationship between a brand and its audiences: A company has high brand engagement if consumers feel emotionally connected to its brand.
Why is brand engagement important?
Brand engagement drives a range of critical marketing and performance metrics—the more connected audiences are to your brand, the greater potential for business growth. Here’s an overview of the benefits of increasing brand engagement.
- Improved word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing encourages customers to promote your company to their networks, which can increase brand awareness and generate referrals.
- Increased sales. Increasing engagement can attract new customers, boost average order value, improve customer retention, and motivate repeat customer purchases.
- Competitive edge. Strong brand engagement can improve employee productivity and help you earn positive press coverage, providing an immediate competitive advantage and increasing your long-term resilience and flexibility.
Types of brand engagement
Here’s an overview on the two main types of brand engagement.
External brand engagement
External brand engagement focuses on the audiences outside of the company, including current and potential customers, potential shareholders, investors, and vendors. Increasing external engagement helps you make sales and improve your relationship with business partners.
Internal brand engagement
Internal brand engagement focuses on employees, which can improve employee engagement and motivation and, in turn, boost profitability. Research shows that companies with highly engaged employees are 23% more profitable and have better employee retention.
How to build external brand engagement
- Create content for individuals
- Solicit customer feedback
- Interact on social media platforms
- Start a loyalty program
External brand engagement strategies focus on providing high-quality customer experiences, increasing brand visibility, and improving your public image. Here are four ways to boost brand engagement with external audiences:
1. Create content for individuals
Direct-to-consumer marketing expert Nik Sharma recommends creating hyper-relevant content by focusing on niche target audiences. “Good content is always created for a couple of people, not for everybody,” Nik says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “You really think of no more than four people that you’re trying to sell to.” This strategy can increase customer engagement by serving audiences with content that feels like it was written just for them.
You can go a step further with marketing personalization, a digital marketing strategy that involves using demographic and behavioral data to customize the timing, content, and delivery of marketing communications for specific individuals. For example, a brand might use browsing information to assess a customer’s purchase intentions and send a targeted email that offers a discount on the relevant product.
2. Solicit customer feedback
Customer feedback programs can boost engagement by making customers feel heard. They also provide valuable feedback about your existing customers’ expectations and experiences, allowing you to measure baseline levels of customer satisfaction, identify strengths and weaknesses, and target improvement.
3. Interact on social media platforms
Social media interactions boost engagement by allowing audiences to connect with your brand. You can facilitate interactions by participating in social media groups, liking and commenting on consumer posts, providing helpful and timely responses to questions or DMs, and soliciting user-generated content.
Publishing engaging social media content can increase your brand’s reach and maximize engagement benefits, but that doesn’t mean you need to overthink it. Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, DTC marketing expert and founder of the branding agency Forge, suggests experimenting with rough-cut and behind-the-scenes content, too. “Content doesn’t have to be ridiculously edited if you just have something good and interesting to say or show off,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters.
4. Start a loyalty program
Loyalty programs increase engagement by recognizing and rewarding your most loyal customers. You can also use them to incentivize behaviors, like making repeat purchases, referrals, or promoting your company on social channels. Refer-a-friend schemes, for example, reward engaged customers for referring new customers to your company.
How to build internal brand engagement
Increasing internal engagement improves your company culture, boosts productivity, and reduces turnover. Here are three strategies to try:
1. Align around brand values
Aligning internal processes with brand values can increase employee engagement and help your team develop, market, and sell your products. For example, a tech brand’s values are agility, innovation, and creativity, but it requires strict adherence to internal processes and resists change. This frustrates employees and limits their ability to deliver customer experiences that reflect the stated values.
Choose brand values that reflect what you deliver to customers and let them inform every area of business operations. If you spot a discrepancy, reshape your practices or adopt a new value set.
2. Solicit feedback
Employee feedback programs are just like customer feedback programs—the only difference is that they focus on building brand loyalty by improving the employee experience. Soliciting employee feedback can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your corporate culture, measure engagement, and track improvements.
Consider using employee focus groups, anonymous surveys, suggestion boxes, and one-on-one interviews.
3. Conduct internal market research
Employee-focused market research can provide insights into employee needs, preferences, and motivators, allowing you to adjust workplace policies and internal messaging based on a better understanding of your audience. A company that learns that its workforce is motivated by opportunities for career advancement, for example, might launch an ongoing employee development program and formally outline internal promotion pathways.
From here, you can treat employees like any other audience group. Set segment-specific campaign goals, identify KPIs, create marketing materials highlighting how your brand meets audience needs, implement your campaign, and monitor performance metrics.
How to measure brand engagement
There’s no definitive test for emotional connection with your brand. Instead, companies monitor a range of metrics that can provide insights into brand engagement, paying special attention to change over time. Here are five common metrics:
Website traffic
Monitor total traffic volumes and user engagement patterns. Increased traffic and increased time on site typically point to higher brand engagement.
NPS
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures approval by asking audiences how likely they are to refer your company to a friend. You can use NPS surveys with customers, employees, or other audience segments.
Email engagement
Email open and click-through rates provide data about the effectiveness of individual subject lines, the information you’re sharing, and your overall email marketing strategy. To isolate brand engagement data, focus on long-term trends over individual email performance. An increase in open rates, for example, could suggest that audiences are becoming more engaged.
Social engagement rates
Social media engagement rates are another proxy for your customer’s relationship with your brand. Pay attention to long-term engagement trends. One viral post can raise awareness of your brand, but it’s not a reliable indicator of connection with your company.
Brand sentiment
Brand sentiment evaluates your brand’s reputation, focusing on positive, negative, and neutral emotions. Companies measure it using sentiment analysis, a process that analyzes written content and extracts sentiment data. Sentiment analysis tools can analyze content like customer reviews, social media posts, blogs, and articles, recognize and classify emotions, and report on the percentage of each. You can also use social listening and brand monitoring tools to track online chatter about your company and identify performance trends.
An example of great brand engagement
Athletic apparel retailer Gymshark is one of the most valuable athleisure companies in the UK. Gymshark was founded in 2012, named the country’s fastest-growing company in 2016, and valued at £1 billion by 2021. It generated more than £400 million in revenue in 2023 and saw a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 40% between 2017 and 2023.
Gymshark’s success is driven by brand engagement strategies such as experiential marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and influencer marketing. The company’s blog, Gymshark Central, publishes high-quality fitness and health content, providing real value to its audience as part of its larger content marketing strategy. It runs social media contests and reposts follower content to boost engagement on social platforms and motivate its seven million Instagram followers to publish branded content: As of 2024, nearly 14 million Instagram posts use the #gymshark hashtag.
Gymshark was also one of the first brands to use authentic influencer marketing partnerships to increase engagement. The company gives influencers complete control over content. Lastly, it gives consumers real-world ways to interact with the brand, from its community-building brand activations like Gymshark Run Clubs to a billboard that encouraged passersby to “shoplift” real Gymshark apparel items from the display.
Brand engagement FAQ
How do you build brand engagement?
Here are some ways to build brand engagement:
1. Personalize marketing campaigns.
2. Solicit feedback from customers and employees.
3. Start a loyalty program.
4. Align brand values with internal practices.
5. Interact with audiences on social platforms.
What is the goal of brand engagement?
The goal of the brand engagement is to build a strong emotional connection between an audience and a brand. Brand engagement strategies focus on building this connection in internal and external audience members.
What is the difference between internal and external brand engagement?
Internal brand engagement focuses on internal audiences (like employees and contractors), and external brand engagement deals with external audiences (like current and potential customers, investors, and members of the press). In both cases, brand engagement refers to the degree of connection the audience feels with the brand.
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