The term brand engagement talks about the level of emotional connection a customer has with a particular brand, and to what level the customer will participate in and identify with the brand. It expresses the associations an individual has with a brand, and the loyalty they have to it. Good brand engagement can be crucial to the success of a company, and should be a chief concern in your marketing and public relations strategy.
Strong brand engagement can be key to your business. Blake Bobit, founder of VNE Marketing, says, “Brand engagement is crucial for building strong relationships with customers and driving sales. It involves being authentic, consistent, responsive, creative, helpful, and fun.”
It’s worth thinking about how people view your brand, interact and associate with it, and how you can strengthen your brand engagement. Your brand engagement can be improved in a variety of ways, depending on your business and existing brand.
How Do You Boost Brand Engagement?
In order to boost brand engagement, there’s a broad array of strategies which are worth considering. These are some of the main strategies you want to incorporate into your brand engagement strategy.
1. Create high quality content and products.
Without high quality things which people enjoy interacting with, building strong brand engagement is basically impossible. If people do not like experiencing your things, whatever they may be, they won’t associate with them. They won’t want to share their experience with them, or identify with them.
People don’t invest themselves in things they think are bad. It’s a simple truth, but an important one to think about in the context of brand engagement. In addition to creating high quality products and content, consider implementing a brand purpose strategy for your organization. People that can identify and connect with your brand’s purpose have a stronger probability of becoming brand advocates and brand ambassadors. Individuals such as these often contribute to promoting your organization to their social circles which can increase brand engagement and your organization’s social promotions dramatically.
Encourage user interaction
User interaction is the bread and butter of brand engagement, and anything you can do to encourage it tends to be good. When your customers are interacting with your brand, they are investing themselves in it. Your brand engagement is growing.
You can encourage user interaction by responding to customers on your social media posts. You can do it by creating contests for your customers to share their thoughts or experiences, and by offering discounts of benefits for interacting with your brand. Great marketing agencies will have creative ways of sparking user interaction, so it’s worth checking out their case studies to see which strategies they recommend.
Leverage your social media
Social media is a great promotional tool, and a place to build your brand engagement. Post often, interact with your customers, and engage with other businesses. If you can be funny or surprising, do. These strategies are some of the most effective when growing a brand.
When interacting on social media, remember to be careful and sensitive. Backlash against brands can be swift and dramatic, so be careful in your interactions.
How Do You Measure Brand Engagement?
In order to incorporate the creation of strong brand engagement into your business strategy, you first need to be able to effectively measure it. Without an understanding of how to measure brand engagement, you won’t be able to tell if you’ve been effective with your efforts, or where you need to devote more energy. Measuring brand engagement is a critical task for any business looking to build a strong, loyal customer base.
In order to effectively measure brand engagement, you need to first define what metrics you want to look at. Many metrics can represent brand engagement, including web traffic, likes or shares on social media, customer reviews, or advertising click through rates. Pick which metrics are the most important for your business.
If PPC ads are a big part of your business strategy, maybe ad click through rates are the most important brand engagement metric. If you have an active, profitable social media presence then maybe likes and shares are the most important metric. Whatever metric is the most important, it’s important not to solely focus on it. Effective monitoring needs both weighting of more important metrics and balancing of all relevant ones.
Once you’ve selected the metrics you care about, start tracking them over time. Create charts to log the metrics, and make sure you are updating them regularly. If you can, boil everything you’re tracking down into one number. This can allow you at a glance to understand the strength of your brand engagement.
Brand Engagement, Summarized
Brand engagement is the level of emotional connection a customer has with a particular brand, and to what level the customer will participate in and identify with the brand. While also important, it is distinct from customer engagement. Focus on brand engagement is less about garnering repeat customers, and more about growing your customer base.
There are many strategies for boosting brand engagement. Your first consideration should always be ensuring your products, servies, and content is the best it can be. People don’t identify with things that they perceive as bad. Encouraging interacting with your users, and being mindful on social media.
Understanding brand engagement and implementing strategies to grow it can be instrumental in growing your business and reaching new customers.
