With the increasing use of mobile devices and tablets, people have become more sophisticated Internet users. They’re no longer passive consumers of brand messages; today customers decide what their relationships with brands look like online.
To better understand how customers engage with brands online – and in turn help marketers craft better engagement strategies – Google and Advertising Age, in collaboration with Advantage Business Research, conducted a recent survey to understand brand engagement from a consumer and advertising/marketing/media professionals perspective.1
According to the survey, a staggering 90.8% of consumer respondents engage with brands online on a regular basis. Among those, 62.8% engage with brands online at least once per week (called “Hyper-Engagers”), while 28% engage with brands online less than once per week (“Engagers”). Within CommandPost, we segment these users in a similar fashion: as Super Advocates and Advocates (as well as Bystanders, Handraisers and VIPs).
The majority (93.6%) of Hyper-Engagers and more than half (55.4%) of Engagers say they use online advertising to make purchase decisions sometimes or often. Thus, companies have the opportunity to capture the attention of Hyper-Engagers and Engagers for their brands by actively managing their online advertising and engagement.
Another interesting finding from the survey is a gap between the stated importance of online brand engagement and the effort that the companies make to manage it. It’s remarkable that even though the large majority (86.2%) of professional respondents agreed that engagement is a priority for their company, only 45.8% stated that their company actually manages engagement.
Since customer engagement becomes an important indicator of a brand’s success, it should be measured. But which metrics are really meaningful?
Leon Barsoumian, VP at Havas Media, said: “People do a million different things that can be classified as ‘engagement,’ but only five might really matter in terms of the drive to purchase. You need to look for that high-value engagement.”
The survey suggests that it’s important that companies measure the right things – for example, their ability to move viewers to take action. Here are the top 10 metrics that professional respondents identified as the most important for measuring engagement:
- Interaction rate
- Reach influencers
- Drive traffic to retail locations/website
- Sales/ROI
- Engagement/Cost-per-engagement
- Conversions
- View-through conversions
- Social buzz
- Shares
- Change brand perceptions/positioning
By providing the access to the metrics listed above, CommandPost enables its users to measure their customer’s engagement in a comprehensive and consistent manner.
In the early days of social media, marketers were striving for more shares, likes and followers. However, these metrics tell nothing about your firm’s performance and little about the people behind the number. In order to be meaningful, social media metrics should be tied to active engagement, and to your company’s business goals. Thus, measuring customer’s engagement helps evaluate your social strategy and fulfill your branded objectives.
Resources
- Brand Engagement in the Participation Age: http://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/brand-engagement-in-participation-age_research-studies.pdf
