What is engagement in marketing: keys to connect with your clients

Engagement in marketing refers to the ability of a brand or company to create an emotional and meaningful connection with its audience, making people interested, involved and feel connected to what the brand offers. In this way, customers not only buy a product or service, but also feel engaged, participate in the different actions of the company and have a long-term relationship with the brand.

Engagement seeks to create loyalty and fidelity among consumers by generating interactions and experiences that make them feel valued and part of the brand’s community. In order to achieve that, your should know who is your buyer persona and who you are addressing.

• Commitment, the key to engagement
• How to measure engagement
• Engagement trends

Commitment, the key to engagement

Engagement is the first word with which it is related, specifically that which the customer acquires with a brand through online channels; with special relevance for social networks.

It has been precisely since companies became aware of the importance of social media that the word engagement has become part of the industry jargon. Connecting with the customer, creating a relationship of trust and interest with them during their recruitment and loyalty is the fundamental axis of engagement, but it goes beyond that. Detecting the customer’s emotions, their thoughts about the company’s content, or their reaction to news are essential elements for generating this engagement.

How to measure engagement

When integrating this concept, it is logically essential to measure it, and on some occasions it is decided to track the number of likes, reactions, comments or shares, these being data that can be easily measured. In any case, it is important to bear in mind that these parameters do not completely clear up the mystery of what the relationship with the customer is like. A global vision of engagement seeks to go deeper into this knowledge of the feelings and ideas that the brand generates in its consumers.

Other indicators used to measure engagement include the average time spent on the page, the number of pages viewed per visitor or the bounce rate.

Engagement and social media

Social media is one of the fields in which the concept of engagement is most widely applied. Currently, the most widespread way of calculating engagement in this area is the sum of the number of likes, comments and shares of a brand’s publication divided by the number of followers.

The most used formula to calculate engagement is the one that involves an aggregate of the number of likes, comments and shares, divided by the total amount of followers. In this formula, the same value is being assigned to all interactions, when each one of them presents a different level of linkage with the user. For example, sharing a publication implies that the user approves its content and endorses it to show it to others, and a like simply shows some interest in it.

However, as a more effective model than the sum of interactions, we bring this other formula, in which we weight each type of interaction. In this one, we also discard the total number of followers for the denominator, because even if you have a large number of followers, you cannot always reach everyone with the same content. Instead, we take into account the number of people who have seen the publication, its reach.

In this way, having a specific value for each interaction and contrasting it with the number of people who have seen the publication, it is possible to get a more realistic result on engagement. With this said, the only thing left to do is to give the necessary impulse for interactions to occur.

And be careful, because in each social network there will be a different target to reach: while on Facebook and X, a good engagement ratio would be between 0.5% and 1%, on Instagram if you have those numbers you can cry. On Instagram, you should have between 3.48% and 6.67% of engagement percentage.

In any case, beyond the calculation itself, the fundamental thing will be to bet on one of the formulas, maintain it over time and see how it evolves.

Engagement beyond social media

But in addition to this ocean of likes and shares, there are other areas in which we can use this concept. Specifically, these would be the most common indicators to measure engagement:

• Click through rate (CTR): In email marketing and advertising campaigns, you can measure how many people click on your links or ads compared to the total number of people who saw them. When we carry out an online advertising campaign, either in search portals (Google par excellence), or in social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, we can find several metrics that help us to understand the interaction and activity of our customers on the Internet.               CTR = ( Number of  clicks/ number of impressions) x 100
• Time on the website: How long visitors spend on your website is a sign of their interest. You can use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track this.
• Bounce rate: This metric shows how many visitors leave your website without interacting with it. A low bounce rate usually indicates higher engagement.
• Comments and reviews: Customer opinions and reviews are a way to measure engagement, as they reflect customer satisfaction and engagement with your brand.
• Participation in events or surveys: If you organize events or surveys, the number of people who attend or respond can be a measure of engagement.
• NPS (Net Promoter Score): It is a metric that measures the willingness of customers to recommend your brand to others. Promoter customers are a sign of high engagement.
• User Generated Content (UGC): When customers share photos, videos or comments related to your brand, they demonstrate a high level of engagement with you.
• Conversations and direct messages: If customers communicate directly with your brand through emails, social media messages, chat, etc.
• Repeat sales: Of course, there is no parameter that better reflects the loyalty of a consumer to a brand than repeat purchases.

Engagement trends

The concept of engagement is evolving over time, generating trends around it that try to capture more realistically the relationship between user and brand.

• Quality metrics over quantity: Rather than simply counting “likes” or followers, companies are paying more attention to quality metrics that reflect true engagement, such as conversion rate, time on website and actual click-through rates rather than impressions.
• Evaluating engagement across multiple channels: As brands expand across multiple digital channels and social networks, they are looking to measure how users interact across all of these touch points to get a more complete picture of engagement.
• Sentiment analysis, with measures such as tracking social media comments and assessing whether they are positive, negative or neutral.
• Microinfluencers and niche marketing: brands are turning to microinfluencers who have smaller followings, but are highly engaged in specific niches.

And all this to achieve relationships that last over time because the conversation with the customer has always been the key, from the explanations of a sales clerk in a physical store to the answers of a community manager, generating a positive reaction with the consumer is the essential piece.

Photo: Depositphotos