Engaging Your Audience

Engage your audience, hold their attention

The internet offers incredible opportunities to interact with your audience – customers and potential customers – on many different levels. Online, “engagement” means making contact on a truly one-to-one basis - starting the dialog, creating lasting relationships, encouraging conversions.

For most marketers, this represents a serious mind-shift from the more traditional, quarterly driven sales campaigns to community driven conversations. The metrics are different as the ROI of socially inspired engagement can rarely be measured directly.

But the biggest challenge is to coordinate messages and conversations across these diverse platforms – from the social-media trinity of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to your website, landing pages, email and ad campaigns, plus offline initiatives. Your content must be both timely and consistent, and your website – your messaging “headquarters” – provides the platform needed to create and measure the conversions that are essential to your success.

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National Wildlife Federation

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Three keys to successful customer engagement

Make a plan, set your goals, decide who you want to engage. See Aviva Life Insurance case study.
Enhancing your communication is always important, but extending it is even more important. Develop engagement strategies for those people your organization does not already know. See OneDrop case study.
Maintain these new relationships. Your strategy must be sustainable to be successful. See Ball State University case study.

Looking for even more inspiration? Then browse through our many cases and see how others have created effective engagement strategies!

Six Questions to Guide Your Initiatives

Far too many organizations take a shotgun approach to customer engagement, launching multiple discussion forums, tweeting indiscriminately, and generally making as much noise as possible. But successful organizations know they need to ask and answer several key questions first:

“Do we really know what our online customer community needs?”
“Does the community know what we can do for them?”
“Are we encouraging the community to help us help them?”
“Is our organization prepared to respond sensibly to community dialog?”
“How do we measure the impact of engagement initiatives?”
“Are we prepared to commit human and physical resources, in addition to money?”

Not easy questions, but important ones nonetheless. Perhaps our current Sitecore customers can inspire you to explore new engagement initiatives in your own company.

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