Customer engagement is a lovely buzzword that marketers like
to toss around. It sounds good, but what are we talking about when we
refer to "engagement"? Is it something that can be measured or is it
just a fluff term?
Right now, you are reading this blog post. You are interacting with content that I have provided online. At its base, this is engagement. The interaction with online content is the key. HOW visitors interact with your online content can also be measured (somewhat imprecisely), so it's not fluff.
Here are a few ways you can measure engagement on your website or social media platforms.
Amount of time spent on website and pages
Knowing how long people are spending on your site and on individual pages you can better understand how interested people are in your content. It's relatively easy to get people to visit your site. Keeping them there and getting them to take action is a challenge.
Subscriptions to newsletters or blogs
If you're not getting many subscriptions on either, your content may not be compelling enough for people to want to receive it regularly. If you're not providing content relevant to your visitor's needs, they won't see the value in subscribing. Consider putting out questions to your audience asking what topics they would like to see covered. Knowing what your audience wants will make it easier to tailor your content to them, increasing engagement.
Follows / Likes / Shares / Comments / Pins etc. on social media platforms
Getting visitors to "like" you on social media isn't all that hard. Keeping them as followers and getting them to share or comment on your content is more challenging. With every post, tweet etc., you have the opportunity to measure how engaging your content is. There are also degrees of engagement. On Facebook, for example, a "share" is more valuable than a "like", and a comment is more valuable than a share.
Contacts and sales opportunities
This is really the "ultimate" measure of engagement. If your website and/or social media campaigns are consistently creating contacts and generating sales opportunities, it's reasonable to assume that you are doing pretty well at customer engagement.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it's a good place to get started in understanding how to improve the overall engagement of your website and social media campaigns. Have a great time implementing on this chilly Monday!