A long term engagement: Is engagement marketing valuable or is it bunk?
I had a good chat this morning with my colleague Larry (Manager, Corporate Training) about a term he has been bumping into in the last few weeks called ‘Social Conversion’. It all seems to stem from a nice blog-post that was written last month by Justin Talerico, CEO of ion Interactive, about the importance of monitoring, understanding and optimizing the micro-conversions associated to social media marketing.
Loved the blog, agreed with the concepts, but not sure we need to coin any new terms. Social Conversion is just another way of saying conversion. According to the WAA Standards Committee, Conversion is “The number of times a desired outcome was accomplished.” So let’s try and really nail down the basic definitions before we throw them out the window and come up with new ones. (Still, it’s a great piece, specifically the landing page and whitepaper examples)
Wondering what my intro has to do with the title yet? Here we go.
Just as the term ‘social conversion’ has been doing the rounds in the last few weeks regarding its relevance and veracity (or truthiness), the concept of engagement in digital marketing has done the rounds for almost two years, and has been the subject of heated debate and scrutiny.
The ongoing dialog (or should I say blogalog? Yet another new term) has revolved around two primary questions:
- Is engagement an important concept?
- If it is important, how can it be quantified.
To learn more about the topic, here are a number of great posts on the subject. I specifically recommend checking out the recent flamewar between Omniture and Eric Peterson, both industry heavyweights with very differing opinions.
I myself blogged on the issue back in February, and my take is that being able to understand and manage visitor engagement to/from/within a given web property is the first major step towards ‘analytics 2.0’. Standardizing what metrics are used however is much more difficult.
If you work with a company like ion Interactive, engagement will have a strong landing page/social media focus. If you are a multi-channel marketer, engagement might have strong online/offline ties.
Having helped some of Sitebrand’s customers directly identify engagement related KPI’s in their business for the purposes of Optimization, I know it works. As for the ‘philosopher’s stone’ of engagement equations that work for every site, the jury is out.
In a fairly new industry like internet marketing, new terms will be coined at the speed of….internet. But some terms stick and have a profound impact on our discipline.
Engagement is one of these important terms.
Do some homework and form an opinion. If you think it’s bunk so be it. But if you think engagement monitoring and management could be a core aspect of your job in the coming years, start applying some of the concepts now so you don’t miss the boat.
Cheers,
Jim
PS. Larry heard I was referencing him in the blog today and wanted to make sure all our customers knew that he is available for all training requests/questions at training AT Sitebrand.com. Go team go!
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Posted in Conversion, Customer Experience, Jim Cain, Optimization, Personalization, Social Media, Web Analytics, eCommerce
3 Comments
Justin Talerico at 16:58 on July 16, 2008
Thanks for the kudos on my Social Conversion piece. After fourteen years in online marketing, it’s interesting to me that so many clients continue to pose the question ‘what is conversion?’. Of course conversion means different things to different organizations. I am advocating that marketers open their minds to conversion outside the typical boxes of transactions and lead forms.
Whatever conversion is for an organization, it’s a small piece of engagement. In ion’s world of strategic landing pages, engagement is the cornerstone of everything. If we can form a basic bond, we can compel user-directed segmentation at the front end of a conversion path. This is a measurable initial engagement metric.
Each time we can successfully deepen segmentation with more specific content we earn another click. Each click is a measure of interest and desire — both components of a relative engagement level. Only when we’ve earned the right to ask for conversion, does it make sense to do so.
Whether a ‘conversion’ is an e-commerce transaction, a lead collected in a form, or something more sustainable like social participation, a marketer’s relative ability to convert is a reflection of their investment in engaging their respondents.
pip at 7:59 on July 18, 2008
If you’ve been online for any length of time at all then you will know the importance of building your targeted email list. A powerful way to capitalise on each email address is to have it automatically linked to your autoresponder which will send a series of followup emails automatically to help close the sale or bring your prospects back to your site. Mostly now the pay off will come ONLY to those in for the LONG HAUL.
I have been slogging it out now since 1997. In the end you just have to keep working it, tweeking it.
REMEMBER
“there is no failure, only learning”
pip
Jim Cain at 12:51 on July 23, 2008
Justin - Totally agreed on the concept that conversion is not simply a straight transaction, like a purchase or lead form. Because we are a personalization vendor, we have a specific way of looking at both conversions and engagement. It would be interesting to ask 20 people in the industry to describe engagement in two sentences or less and see what you get back.
Here’s my attempt: Engagement is the measurement of the ‘closeness’ a given visitor has to both your brand and the primary goals of your business.
When you have to throw down ‘closeness’ in a description, you know you are dealing with a nebulous term. Still one I think is important though.
Pip - Thanks for the comment. I think that email is an important element in both the measurement and management of engagement, but exists as an aspect of online engagement only. You send email to a visitor (push), your website has a visitor choose to go there (pull). I think as the concept develops you are going to see email metrics tying much closer into web analytics profiles for this very reason.
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