Re-Define the Buzzword: Engagement

We all wish there was a way for us to get a more return without spending any more money. After all, that's just human nature! What does the word engagement really mean to your business? Engagement is not only something we experience before getting married, but it's something that every marketer and business as a whole would like to improve upon. Whether it is users, employees, customers, blog readers or on social media - engagement is another buzzword thrown out there and often used out of context. Engagement for businesses starts with someone being interested, evolves with them remaining attentive and the end goal of any engagement strategy is action. So if we were to relate this to our personal lives, engagement starts with being attracted to someone else, evolves with enjoyment and ends with love.

The top part, Interest, Attention, Action, correlates to Engagement Marketing. The bottom part relates this to our personal lives, Attraction, Enjoyment, and Love.

"The Rings of Engagement" is a fun take on the role that engagement plays in our business lives alongside our personal lives. The top part of the image correlates to Engagement Marketing. First, you must derive interest from your audience. Once you have their interest, you've gained their attention. Finally, this hopefully turns into an action that converts. This can be compared to a marriage engagement in a similar way. First you are attracted, then it evolves into enjoyment, and finally love. While this is a lighthearted and funny analogy, we hope it paints a clearer image of what engagement can really mean to a company.

The actual definition for "brand engagement" on Wikipedia is:

Brand engagement is the process of forming an emotional or rational attachment between a person and a brand. It comprises one aspect of brand management. What makes the topic complex is that brand engagement is partly created by institutions and organizations, but is equally created by the perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of those with whom these institutions and organizations are communicating or engaging with.

Our Alternative Definition: Transforming a brand into a community. 

Communities come in all different forms. We often work with customers in multiple industries that create and manage very niche panels and communities. Just like we mentioned earlier, the end goal of engagement is an action. Whether you are asking a consumer insights panel for feedback on your newest product or service or asking your customers what they want to see next, it is all part of the engagement strategy with the end goal(s) of purchasing followed by referring more business. One of the most important things to our customers is to know how engaged their survey respondents are or entire community is, and that's why we have made recent enhancements in our software like interactive dashboards and the panel health dashboard. 

So now we are offering some words to use instead of "engagement", but effectively mean the same thing. 

Voice of Customer

The voice of customer is a methodology used to understand what customers expect and what customers need or want. When used appropriately, it produces an organized and easy to analyze set of wants and needs and prioritizes them. Voice of customer (VoC) studies often consist of both ongoing qualitative and quantitative research methods. Some features we have to help find and act upon the voice of the customer include net promoter scoring, real-time action alerts, trend analysis tools and CRM integration. 

Net Promoter Score

Beyond just the voice of your customer, net promoter score (NPS) is a simplified way for leaders to commit to customer loyalty efforts. The score alone will not make your business successful, but the steps you take to improve the overall score will. The net promoter score divides customers into three categories (promoters, passives and detractors) based on a scoring system that ranges from 1 to 10. From there, business leaders can appropriately act on the feedback to achieve results and take steps to improve the overall NPS score as an organization. 

Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing (WOM) is when a customer or employee's interest for a brand is often thought of and even recommended to others in daily aspects of their lives. Word of mouth marketing is an emotional bond between a person and a brand and can be achieved by not only collecting feedback on brand interactions, but by listening. Emotional impact and viral content rarely happens from just guessing. 

Trade-off Scenarios

We can't always predict the future, but we can get a general idea by applying market research and some more advanced methodologies. How can we find out what we need to do and what's in it for our employees, customers and everyone else? Conjoint analysis works great in any trade-off scenario where you want to find out what will work the best in terms of pricing, offerings, timing and much more. MaxDiff scaling is a little different and easier to deploy than conjoint and it can reveal what is most preferred and least preferred.

Now that we've offered some alternative words to use, we hope that the next time you hear the word "engagement", some of these come to mind. How would you redefine the word engagement? What are some more specific terms you prefer to use in its place? Stay tuned as over the next few weeks we redefine some of the most overused buzzwords in business and provide some alternatives words you may want to consider using instead. Or if you wish to see more posts like this, check out last week's re-defining the buzzword on big data here. 

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