What is Customer Engagement Marketing?
Social media has changed how marketers are approaching their target audiences. It used to be that marketers would create a single message and distribute it across multiple channels.
With the rise of social media and the fact that each platform is built within a different contextual framework, marketers moved to an approach more focused on creating multiple messages for a single campaign that they distribute over various channels.
All these efforts are done in the hopes of attracting “the right customer”. It’s pretty easy to see how this could set up a scenario where marketers are scrambling to keep up.
But what if there were an easier way? What if a brand didn’t have to rely so heavily on a mass message, but instead decided to tune into personalizing their approach for individual customers?
If that sounds interesting to you, you may just want to check out customer engagement marketing.
What Exactly Is Customer Engagement Marketing?
Customer engagement marketing is marketing that uses personalized messaging to move a company’s ideal prospects through the sales funnel.
You attract them into the funnel, nurture them and then turn them into customers that are loyal brand evangelists.
Today, a company needs to move beyond simply communicating its brand promise and actually start to fulfill that promise for its consumers at key marketing, information gathering and conversion points.
Customer engagement marketing creates a unique engagement with leads and customers throughout the entire journey of the sales funnel.
So, how does your business create a customer engagement marketing strategy?
Getting Started With Customer Engagement Marketing
Whether you are emailing customers or interacting with prospects online, you are carrying out an engagement strategy.
When it comes to customer engagement marketing, you want to encourage your customers to interact with your brand across all it’s channels.
You want to provide an opportunity for a two-sided conversation that allows you to listen to their questions or needs and then provide them excellent customer service that addresses those needs.
The stronger your engagement and the more thoroughly you handle these questions and needs, the more likely consumers are to become your brand’s evangelists.
An Example Of Customer Engagement Marketing
Still not sure exactly what customer engagement marketing might look like in real life?
Let’s look at a real-world scenario. Imagine you get a personalized email message from the founder/designer or your favorite online boutique shoe store.
The email you received is to notify you that there is a new line of sandals coming out this week and they thought you would be interested in seeing some photos and details about the line. That is customer engagement marketing.
The truth is this is just one example of many types of ways you can personalize the brand to consumer connection.
There are so many ways, in fact, that consumer engagement marketing is actually an approach that is a great one for just about any type of industry.
CEM is hyper-focused marketing that connects your brand with people who have already bought from you, or who you know are actively shopping for the product/service you offer.
In other words, it’s not a shotgun approach of mass marketing that used to dominate brand’s marketing efforts.
Whether your business is B2B or B2C, you want to build and maintain positive relationships and connections with your customers. Customer Engagement Marketing is an excellent way to achieve this.
Customer Engagement Marketing Improves The Overall Customer Experience
With a focus on personalized touchpoints, customer engagement marketing builds relationships because it is improving your brand’s overall customer experience.
Your customers no longer feel simply like a number in a vast sea of other numbers.
Instead, you are engaging with them, one-on-one in a fashion that allows them to feel like they aren’t being “talked at”, and rather a validated part of the conversation.
This extra care and attention are appreciated by them and helps convert them into brand evangelists.
Customer Engagement Marketing Offers All The Upsides With None Of The Trip Wires
Customer engagement marketing focuses on the long-term value of the customer relationship, rather than the prospect of simply trying to get a “quick win” for a conversion.
Here’s what Jon Suarez-Diaz of Salesforce had to say about using customer engagement marketing and how meaningful it is in today’s marketing landscape — this was at the AdExchanger conference.
Consumers pick up on this and focusing on a customer engagement strategy as part of your daily marketing efforts will lead to better customer experiences, more consumers singing your praises, and ultimately more of a likelihood you will be considered the thought leader in your market space.
How Are You Improving Customer Engagement With Marketing?
If you need any tips on coming up with a customer engagement strategy, let us know in the comments below and we’ll provide some more pointers.
