Is engagement enough or do we need a business solution approach?

Gone are the days, when digital was about creating long term assets (either content, data or technology-led). Today, what we term as digital marketing ecosystem is being defined with two building blocks i.e. Paid media and Social Media. And they are evaluated with the lens of Paid, Owned and Earned channels.

There are two perspectives, one is post performance and another is campaign performance. Likes are mainly considered as contributing metrics when evaluating posts related performance from the larger context of Engagement. That’s why, ‘Likes’, ‘Comments’ or ‘Shares’ are considered major engagement metrics. Whether the audience engaged or consumed or followed the expected call to action, just by the mere click on the like button ensures that its added as a +1 in the engagement metrics.

Yes, this is not the ideal and true reflection of engagement. However, social media is all about network effect and their algorithm works to facilitate this. One like leads to an organic reach to that individual’s network. It adds to engagement metrics as well as acts as a probable catalyst for reach.

Hence, the continuous endeavour is meeting specific performance metrics. However, ironically, in majority of the cases, they are – planned, managed, evaluated and optimized – in silos; due to which overall business objectives are completely ignored.

Then, what engagement actually leads to?

Thanks to media publishers and media buying agencies; every aspect of Value is now either engagement metrics or its trickled effect to leads generation. It’s a pay-as-you-go model which is creating spikes i.e. Audience see an interesting offer or deal and click on it, if it matches their expectations and budget, they convert; or else they move on.

There aren’t any substantial evidence or cases where these social engagements have created a unaided brand recall leading to brand consideration or preference post their engagement on social media and then to an unaided sale.

From the existing performance metrics perspective, engagement is definitely adding to Share-of-Voice (SoV) in brands’ category but it is not creating a brand preference in majority of the cases. Barring the likes of Swiggy, Zomato, Netflix etc., social media engagement for the majority of brands today is only limited to amazing engagement numbers adding up to the SoV every month. Brands need to rethink their social strategy and evaluate how it is adding to their business goals instead of a siloed channel-approach.

How Content Marketing builds on Engagement Metrics to solve business problems

Content marketing is defined by a cohesive ecosystem of paid, owned and earned media (POEM). It follows the standard consumer journey of Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Conversion and now, new elements have been added to it i.e. Advocacy to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Content-first approach defines specific metrics of ROI across various stages as per business objectives. And then specific channels are chosen depending on the audience consumption behaviour.

Ironically, majority of digital marketing campaigns (theoretically social media campaigns) are with channel first approach and then they all add up to the overall communication objective. Basically a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down approach.

The solution is – to make content marketing effective, we need to start aligning an overall content-first approach to meet specific business objectives. And then define the metrics for specific in-channel and from-channel campaigns.

So, why every brief is about Social Performance Metric – ‘Engagement’?

If we analyse the brand marketers today, both in the brand side as well as the client side, there are mainly two breeds available – Social Media Marketers and Media Marketers. We are facing a major dearth of business solution marketers’ thinking who sees the overall ecosystem from a larger perspective and creates broader business goals and metrics and then defines it for channel-wise objectives.

But the show has to go on for brands and that’s why most of the existing metrics are driven by this shortcut approach of relying on already available performance dashboards from the analytics section of social media platforms. Plus the campaign performance from media agencies.

Another important aspect to be highlighted here is the unfamiliarity of digital media in our fraternity. We have to start seeing the bigger picture by understanding how digital (data, content and technology) can be weaved in a strategic framework and solve business problems.

We all know it, it’s imperative that we start practising it

Marketing is not about just siloed channel-wise performance metrics; it is a combination of Paid, Owned and Earned Media (POEM) effectively working as building blocks towards achieving common business objectives.

We need to evolve from a channel-first approach to a business solutions led content marketing approach and solve business problems brands are facing today.