To both acquire and retain customers, marketers must drive engagement. And today, that means having an engagement marketing strategy — an approach designed to create and capitalize on opportunities for meaningful interactions with a target audience — in place.
To help you drive better digital engagement, we’ve put together this guide highlighting impactful engagement marketing strategies that can help you boost revenue while maximizing customer loyalty and engagement.
What is Engagement Marketing?
Engagement marketing, or customer engagement marketing, is a marketing strategy designed to create meaningful engagement opportunities with a target audience. Companies often use it to build stronger relationships with customers and prospects.
Engagement marketing strategies are set apart from other strategies mainly by focusing on personalization. They aim to deliver content optimized for a specific audience segment at the right time through the right channel to spark interactions.
These interactions are formulated to provide genuine value to the audience — pointing them to helpful content or reminding them of a limited-time offer, for example. Over time, they can transform customers into brand loyalists.
How to Start a Customer Engagement Marketing Strategy
Creating an engagement marketing strategy involves many of the same steps as creating any other type of marketing strategy. Here’s an overview of the process, discussing each of the key elements.
Setting Clear Objectives for Your Engagement Marketing Campaign
Like any other form of marketing, engagement marketing campaigns work best when built around clearly defined objectives. This ensures they align with overall business goals and can contribute meaningfully to key performance indicators, or KPIs.
To decide on an objective, think about how customer engagement can feed into your wider business goals. If boosting long-term revenue is the goal, for example, an engagement marketing campaign could be designed specifically to increase customer retention and, by extension, customer lifetime value, or CLV for short.
Identifying and Understanding Your Target Audience
Engagement marketing strategies rely on effective audience targeting to ensure personalized content delivery. Accordingly, identifying a well-defined target audience and analyzing their needs, preferences and behaviors is an important first step.
Using a data-led approach works best, so think about how you can gather information from your audience. This might involve pulling existing data from your customer relationship management (CRM) platform or conducting a customer survey to collect new data.
Crafting Personalized and Relevant Content
Effective content is at the core of a successful customer engagement marketing campaign, and the most important factor in its effectiveness is how well it resonates with the audience. There are two main components in resonant content: personalization and relevance.
Personalization ensures that the content connects with the audience, grabs their attention, and makes them feel valued as customers. It can be as simple as personalizing emails with customer names or as complicated as creating dynamic content funnels that adapt to different customer segments.
Relevance is about getting the right message to the right audience at the right time and ensuring that it’s genuinely helpful. A great example of relevant content is sending a thorough product tutorial email to new users immediately after they sign up.
Leveraging the Right Engagement Marketing Tools and Platforms
Since engagement marketing focuses on personalization, tools and platforms that deliver insights from customer data and make it easier to deliver personalized content experiences through diverse channels are both highly valuable.
Platforms that collect engagement and first-party data from previous campaigns provide an opportunity to analyze customer behavior, simplifying the process of building customer segments that you can use for future personalized campaigns.
Content personalization tools allow you to roll out personalized content experiences at scale, often using AI-powered features to partly automate the process. This means you can reach diverse segments across your customer base with relevant messages without compromising on quality.
The ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform contains a suite of tools designed to maximize the effectiveness of engagement marketing campaigns. It collates data from across channels, provides automated insights into customer behavior, and streamlines large-scale content personalization.
Impactful Engagement Marketing Strategies
The following strategies are particularly well-suited to driving success in engagement marketing campaigns. They make it easier to target audiences with the right content and maximize the impact of each interaction.
Enhancing Customer Experience with Personalized Communication
Personalization in communication is the cornerstone of engagement marketing, and identifying opportunities to achieve it should be the focus of practically every element of an engagement-focused campaign, whatever channel it uses.
Depending on the product features they use most, you can personalize email content to suit a specific audience segment’s needs. Elsewhere, you can integrate chatbots on your website to offer personalized interactions that point users towards relevant articles.
Utilizing Data to Refine Engagement Strategies
Knowing your customers’ needs and needs allows you to create meaningful interactions with them through content. Data collection and analysis should, therefore, be a central part of your customer engagement marketing strategy.
Use every tool at your disposal, including CRM data, survey tools and customer feedback, to build a full picture of your customer base. Then, define customer segments based on shared traits, such as how long customers have been signed up or what sector they work in.
These segments can form the basis of your personalization strategy. Treat them as distinct audiences and target them with content that suits their needs. Just remember to update your segments regularly to ensure they remain accurate over the long term.
Nurturing Customer Relationships through Interactive Content
Interactive content is a powerful tool in engagement marketing because it’s naturally suited to triggering audience interaction. There are diverse types of interactive content to consider using, including interactive webinars, polls or quizzes and product demos
These content types are great for engaging your audience, but they also have the added benefit of providing more data that you can use to refine your engagement strategy further.
Engaging Audiences with Captivating Video Content
Video content is also well-suited to capturing attention and is associated with higher engagement rates than most other forms of content. Best of all, video content is endlessly adaptable, meaning you can use it throughout your engagement marketing strategy for diverse purposes.
There are many formats to explore, from explainer videos to live-streamed product demos. As you build a video content strategy, think about how you can repurpose the content to suit other mediums. A full webinar, for example, can later be chopped up into smaller videos that are great for driving engagement on social media.
Driving Engagement through Strategic Content Marketing
A strategic approach to content marketing is essential for effectively targeting audiences with engaging content that suits their needs. Using a content marketing guide can help you understand how to structure this approach strategically.
Build your content marketing strategy around customer data to ensure you have all the content you need for your campaign. Identifying the most common customer pain points and using those as the basis for your content is a great place to start, maximizing the chances that your content will be relevant to your customers’ needs.
Also, consider the diverse content formats available to you. Some topics will be best covered in a blog post, while others might make more sense in a video or whitepaper.
The Impact of Engagement Marketing on Business Growth
Engagement marketing can play a key role in a broader marketing strategy but, to make the most of it, you need to know how to measure performance and stay ahead of the curve.
Analyzing the ROI of Engagement Marketing Strategies
Measuring the success of an engagement marketing strategy isn’t as simple as with other types of marketing because the metrics for success aren’t strictly limited to immediate revenue generation.
Depending on what objective you set for your engagement marketing campaign, you might consider diverse metrics like customer retention, total engagement time, social media profile growth, or even increased product reviews as a marker of success.
Whatever you decide is an appropriate measure of your campaign’s ROI, make sure to measure it accurately. Like all marketing strategies, engagement marketing works best when performance data can be used to tweak the approach over time.
Future Trends: The Evolving Landscape of Engagement Marketing
The most important engagement marketing trends in 2024 relate to new ways of tackling the challenge of creating campaigns that perform well at scale. AI is at the center of the conversation, as it’s likely to play an increasingly important role in large-scale content personalization.
Adopting an engagement marketing platform with AI features is one of the best ways to stay ahead of the trend and ensure efficient campaign creation. Already, AI tools can help analyze customer data, build personalized content funnels, and autonomously handle customers via chatbots.
Leveraging Engagement Marketing Strategies
A successful engagement marketing campaign can dramatically impact overall business performance, increasing the loyalty of existing customers and attracting new ones. However, it relies on a strategic approach oriented around a clear objective and powered by data.
Take full advantage of the data you have available to you, leverage different types of content depending on your needs, put personalization at the core of your approach, and monitor performance so you can make refinements.
To get the most from your engagement marketing strategy, use a dedicated customer engagement solution like the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform to get the benefits of advanced analytics, AI-powered automation, and more.
