Is your content earning you real brand engagement?

Many brand custodians tell us in private how their content initiative generated an overwhelming number of likes and shares. But no visible or measurable business objective was achieved. While there could be many reasons such as the lack of brand fit, relevance of the content for the target audience or not-so-clever brand placements, there is certainly a need to understand whether the engagement generated by the content was real or not.

In the previous article titled ‘Engagement as a success metric: An easy way out for marketers or value for money?’ we discussed how engagement, which is an important step towards achieving business goals, is now being used by marketers as a success metric for chest-thumping. Now, in the new scenario, when engagement has largely become a goal itself, if done well, it may deliver many positive results for the brand, which may lead to ‘call to action’ eventually.

Likes on a Facebook post are often casual and without consuming content, or come from irrelevant audience as a result of ad fraud. Regardless of these drawbacks, they help increase the reach of your content. But experts refrain from calling it engagement.

What is engagement in real terms?

By definition, engagement is a combination of behaviour / response that a customer displays towards a brand.

Given that attention spans are decreasing by the day, moving beyond likes and capturing attention is imperative. It is a more actionable way for your brand to measure engagement.

Madhura Ranade

“Surely, it is much easier to gauge how your content has performed by checking the number of likes it got, but posting a comment, saving or sharing, shows much deeper engagement and gives you so much richer context and consumer insight. Attention will come when the audience finds affinity with the brand, and trusts the brand. That, coupled with video watch time, is what can be considered an insight into where the viewers are retained and at what point they drop off,” said Madhura Ranade, Head-Branded Content and Partnerships, Isobar.

A website visit, opening an emailer, installing the brand app or even writing a comment whether positive or negative about a brand on social media is a form of brand engagement and a potential opportunity to convert a customer in the purchase funnel going forward.

Zameer Kochar

According to Zameer Kochar, VP, Marketing and Member Engagement, InterMiles, “While a consumer engagement may not immediately result into desired business conversions, any form of engagement is a good metric to assess the intent and interest that a customer is showing towards your brand. It grants brands an opportunity to facilitate the consumer’s movement from the top-of-the-funnel phase of ‘Brand Awareness’ to the middle-of-the-funnel phase of ‘Brand Consideration’.”

One aspect is ‘in-the-now’, i.e. how the audience engaged with that specific piece of a social post. It is defined by likes, comments, shares and an organic reach due to network effect.

Another aspect is ‘what-it-lead-to’, i.e. on basis of all these standard likes, comments and shares, how many people actually engaged and followed the expected call-to-action.

Nishith Srivastava

“A funnel effect of both these aspects leads to the brand engagement in effective terms,” said Nishith Srivastava, National Head of Strategy, Indigo Consulting.

Dixit Javia

Dixit Javia, Business and Media Head, Flying Cursor Interactive, believes that there isn’t a set formula that defines engagement in real terms in a dynamic world.

He said, “In my opinion, brand engagement should be defined as per campaign objectives and goals. For video content, it could be a video view duration to measure the consumption of the brand message. In the case of content, it could be participation.”

How content helps fetch real engagement

A consumer may like a piece of witty or purposeful advertising but the content piece holds their attention and generates engagement which is sometimes of the highest level.

Anand Pathak

Attention span should be considered an important metric, said Netmed’s CMO Anand Pathak. “Given the number of content options available, if a person is actually spending time on your content, then definitely it will fall into your bottom of the funnel going forward.”

It is a known fact that content impacts customer engagement at various levels – right from increasing brand visibility and improving brand recognition to building overall brand authority and credibility. However, for it to be more effective, the content needs to be relevant, engaging and meaningful for the customer, feels Kochar.

He said, “The format, whether it's an audio, video, infographic or a blog, is then just a means to an end; depending on the platform, a brand chooses to bring alive the message. In fact a lot of brands now have their own blogs, which help in driving higher SEO Rankings and improved website traffic. It also is beneficial to acquire new customers from blog-generated content. According to a HubSpot report, brands that have their own blogs see 2X the number of inbound links versus companies that don’t. A well-planned content marketing calendar will help create a position of leadership in one’s respective industry.”

Content marketing is defined by a perfect ecosystem of paid, owned and earned media (POEM). As per its theory, it follows the standard consumer journey of awareness, consideration, preference, conversion and in recent times, a new element ‘advocacy’.

A content-first approach is the key for Srivastava as it defines specific metrics of ROI across various stages as per business objectives and then, channels are chosen depending on the audience behaviour.

He said, “Ironically, in the present context, a large part of digital marketing campaigns comprise the channel- first approach and then they all add up to the overall objective. Basically a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down approach.”

Simply put, content marketing can be made effective to fetch real engagement if we 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.