Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement in Digital Marketing

Customer engagement is important when thinking in terms of digital marketing channels, or in other words your digital communications mix. The concept of customer engagement relates to continuous and repeating dialogue which goes on between the company and its customers. As the dialogue and communication continues the depth and breadth of customer relationship develops at physical investment, emotional and psychological levels.

So if you managed to attract a customer or visitor to your site for the first time, well done! However challenge for marketers is to engage with visitors so that they become repeat visitors, and loyal customers. Visitors and customers most engage in a continuous dialogue and communication to make custom engagement effective.

The continuous dialogue and communication takes place through blogs and videos, but more likely via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google + and others (see other lessons on this website for a fuller list of social media platforms). There are a number of ways in which marketers need to deal with this conversation; for example if a customer goes straight to Facebook to complain about a poor product then you need to be ready to comment as quickly as possible in order to turn a negative into a positive i.e. by reacting quickly will see that your business cares about the customer experience and the media with which they engage.

Customers will comment on blogs, on YouTube videos, on your own website or the website of others, such as Trip Advisor.

Trip Advisor is an example of a third party website which engages customers based upon their experience of hotels, flights, restaurants and similar. It’s the world’s largest travel sites and the argues that enables travellers to plan for the future based upon the goal of the perfect trip. The site itself gets more than 216 million unique monthly visitors, all largely using reviews to inform the basis of their holiday decisions.

So if you have an excellent experience in a particular hotel, you would go to Trip Advisor and post your comments. Others will do the same either negating or emphasising your points. One thing is for sure, business owners take Trip Advisor very seriously. A poor rating might lead to poor bookings and less profits.