Updated: Jun 22

By Philippe Guinaudeau, CEO

From brand awareness to brand engagement: the necessary steps – Part 2

What is a brand engagement strategy?

Every brand has the opportunity to implement engagement strategies that will benefit their current and prospective customer bases. An effective engagement strategy can prove critical to helping brands connect with customers in better ways that will keep them wanting to remain customers. You cannot begin developing or implementing any kind of engagement strategy without knowing who your customers are and how they engage with your brand.

When implementing engagement strategies, brands should define and track metrics to see what works and what doesn’t in order to improve customer connections.. Engagement strategies are defined as building a stronger relationship with customers through understanding their journeys and the ways in which they engage with a brand through a variety of interactions, whether online or offline. Regardless of the number of touch points involved, customers assess their journey with brands as a whole experience, which is what defines having a solid customer engagement strategy.

Essentially, the engagement strategy is a continuum that starts with just making them aware of a brand – brand engagement cannot exist without brand awareness and brand recognition -, to getting them genuinely excited about the product or service, if we consider the definition by the National Business Research Institute. The purpose of brand engagement is to guide customers through a journey, starting with awareness, that builds up to customers becoming advocates for a product or service, which is the highest form of engagement. Implementing a strategy of brand engagement means becoming more knowledgeable about consumers opinions and preferences, which, in turn, helps to deliver better customer experiences and creates a connection between you and them.

Brand engagement draws consumers into the business, typically through a larger awareness campaign; customer engagement moves consumers toward taking action, like buying the product. Essentially, the process of building close relationships with your customers is called brand engagement. Brand engagement refers to the bond that customers have with the brand or the product, and how that brand keeps that bond with its customers. Brand engagement calls on customers to engage with the brand through social media and other forms of communication, but more importantly through actual purchases.

Supporting customers via digital engagement channels helps promote brand awareness, builds brand loyalty, and nurtures relationships from acquisition to retention. Digital engagement with customers is a critical component to your brands business strategy, contributing to the success (or failure) of the brands overall experience. Improving your customer engagement with the brands has the potential for an obvious positive effect on brand loyalty, encouraging first-time buyers and customers to become repeat customers, while making sure that all interactions and touch points are handled seamlessly. Deep engagement fosters long-lasting brand loyalty and steady revenue growth.

A well-executed marketing strategy incorporating brand engagement can be extremely effective at winning back business and driving in new customers. A clearly defined engagement strategy also helps you, as a company, to discover and understand the customers main pain points when using your products/services, so that you can address those efficiently and keep customers engaged. As your business centers your strategy on your customers, you will want to create an engagement strategy that is champion-friendly. From data gathering (via a CRM, sales engagement platform, or sales automation tools) to customer reviews and forums, building out your engagement strategy involves just as much social listening and research as brand advocacy.

By taking a data-driven approach, brands can increase the pace at which they execute, increase sales with better segmentation and insights into customer behaviors, and enhance engagement. By now, it is evident that brands can boost revenue and drive business growth at a higher level by placing an emphasis on engaging customers. By bringing together all the business units in your company, segmenting your customers by lifecycle stage, revenue potential, and their current interactions, and engaging with the right forms of content in the right channels, you can get them to really love your brand and products.

And good news: BrandTrends is all about that: identifying, measuring, weighting, and analysing all key metrics of the brand engamenet process:

• Awareness (unaided and tested)
• Attitudes towards the brand
• Top favorit brands
• Popularity
• Ownership
• Purchase intentions
• Purchase intentions by product category
• Scorecard

You now have the ability to easily be informed, analyze, and make decisions based on facts, not intuitions – no matter what they could be excellent! -. Contact if you want to know more.

And stay tune for our next part, ‘How to create brand engagement?‘.