What is brand engagement and why is it important?

Brand engagement is all about how you and your brand interact with your customers, clients, shareholders, workers, and other key stakeholders. The aim is to build up a good working relationship over time and create loyalty to your company and enhance employer branding. This can encourage potential customers to pick your brand or your company over your competitors. It can also encourage people to invest in your brand and want to work for you.

Looking to build brand engagement? Unsure what brand engagement strategy would work best for you? Here are our best tips for building on your current strategy and why focusing on brand engagement is a great form of outreach.

What is brand engagement?

Broadly speaking, brand engagement is ensuring people feel involved and engaged with who you are as a company. This goes further than simple awareness of your brand. Awareness makes your brand known, its main purpose is to get initial contact with a potential customer, investor, or employee. Engagement is what happens after — how you interact with people, the promise you make and keep and showing that you stand above the competitors in your field.

It’s important not to mistake brand engagement for customer engagement. There are a few subtle differences that affect how you go about strategising for these different types of engagement:

Customer engagement

This solely focuses on customers, consumers or clients. These can be your customers, whether you are dealing with consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B). This is more limited in scope compared to looking at brand engagement.

Brand engagement 

This can be any way that anyone connects to your brand, whether that’s as an investor, employee, executive, client or customer. Brand engagement strategies are worthwhile because the right one can have a big impact, especially compared to focusing just on customer engagement strategies.

Break down your brand engagement further by looking at different parts of the subject. This is an important step because you will most likely find that different types of engagement require slightly nuanced approaches. For example, two of the most important types are:

Internal brand engagement

This is when you focus on your engagement and interactions with people inside your company. Internal brand engagement examples include anything that’s done to improve morale and working conditions or anything with explicit employer branding, such as company events, conventions and seminars, branded material, and team-building days.

External brand engagement

This refers to outward-facing engagement, which includes anyone not part of the company. This is a more common type of brand engagement, though both are important. External brand engagement can include anything aimed at customers, investors, or other interested parties. For example, websites, social media, adverts, promotions, and more.

Why is brand engagement important?

Building a strong connection with the people involved in your business — from investors to customers — is necessary to boost profits in both the short- and long-term. You want to be the number-one go-to whenever a customer or client needs the service you provide or the first place employees want to work. Here are some of the best ways that brand engagement marketing and strategy can help your company:

• Improved sales
• Better loyalty to the brand
• Retention and acquisition of employees
• Makes it easier to get feedback
• Higher employee satisfaction
• Improved employee performance
• Develop your company’s narrative
• Highlights your goals and values

How to build a brand engagement strategy

Looking to start focusing your company’s strategy on engagement, or wondering how to boost it? Here are some of our top tips for how to make sure that your engagement, both internal and external, is giving you the best benefits possible:

1. Spotlight customer reviews

Reviews are a great way to show your engagement with customers. However, don’t just trust that people will find good reviews of your company online. Instead, spotlight customer reviews on your social media and website. Better yet, try to get your customers to create user-generated video or picture reviews to show their experience.

2. Welcome client feedback

It’s important to always improve your services based on feedback, so asking for client feedback is a good strategy to implement, regardless. Plus, asking clients for feedback and showing improvement based on their comments will make your customers feel like you listen to them.

3. Personalise communications with clients on different channels

Having standard messages throughout your marketing and customer interactions will make people feel like they aren’t really interacting with you. Personalised messages make people feel like they’re important and seen.

4. Encourage user-generated content

Anything that gets people involved in the brand helps with engagement. Video and picture campaigns are great ways to get clients and employees to feel like they are part of the brand, and they make great content for websites and social media.

5. Utilise social media

With so many online platforms, it can be hard to focus on them all, but if you use social media, make sure to utilise it properly. Interact with customers, respond to their messages and have special events to get people to contribute.

6. Consider a video marketing strategy

Video marketing is a great way to reach out to people with a more personalised touch. Plus, you can use user-generated videos for video marketing to get great representation from all the people engaged with your brand, highlighting a great sense of community.

7. Boost brand engagement at events, conferences, and seminars

Industry events and seminars are a perfect time to boost your engagement. Be sure to interact with returning customers and potential new customers, do talks, and, of course, have some special offers or branded merchandise on offer for people who use your services already.

8. Discounts and special offers

Special offers are a great way to make sure people keep coming back, plus it shows how much you appreciate their repeat purchase. It’s important to ensure your offers are not only aimed at new customers — while that is good for brand awareness, it’s bad for brand engagement.

9. Encourage word-of-mouth

Word of mouth is a great tool, and you want to encourage people to talk, whether that’s through user-generated videos or on your social media. You can also put incentives in place for customers and employees to talk about your company.

10. Keep innovating

If your brand engagement isn’t quite working, innovate and change things up. Make sure you’re at the front of the pack by keeping your employer branding and engagement up to date. Struggling with ideas for how to keep up with your employer band and engagement? See how the L’Oréal employer brand is constantly being redefined.

How to measure brand engagement

Of course, wanting to improve your brand engagement is a great goal, but you need to be able to measure your progress to see if your strategy is working. That’s where brand engagement metrics come in.

Unsure how to measure brand engagement? Here are some of our top suggestions:

1. Email subscriptions and read percentages

Emails are a great way to stay in touch. Seeing how many people are subscribed (and stay subscribed) shows you how well your brand engagement is going. Possibly more important is how many people actually read the emails you send them. A low read or open rate for emails suggests that you might need to change your strategy.

2. Website hits vs. conversion rate 

Website hits usually relate to your brand awareness, showcasing how many people visit your site. Conversion rate (how many people sign up or complete a transaction) will show what people actually think of your brand once they have started to engage with it.

3. Direct feedback 

Feedback is essential. Anonymous surveys are more likely to get honest opinions of long-term engagement.

4. Social media engagement

It’s normal to have good social media engagement from people who are newly interested in your brand, or following a special offer. However, you should look at longer-term engagement and see if people keep coming back to check the viability of your strategy over longer periods.

4. Employee engagement and interaction 

When looking at internal brand engagement, consider whether your employees are engaging or not. Look at how many people respond to emails or messages that are non-essential, how many people attend events, and how they speak of the company.

6. Brand sentiment

There are lots of software options available to track brand sentiment. They analyse reviews and keywords, giving you a good idea of how your company is seen; this is vital to see if your brand becomes less engaging.

Final thoughts

Making sure that customers, investors and employees all have a good relationship with your brand is vital for the continued success of a company. That’s why making a solid brand engagement strategy is a great step to help boost your organisation. The more you can get people involved with the process, the better. From personalised communications to user-generated video content, there are plenty of ways to reach out to people and boost engagement. Use the right tools to measure your success and ensure that your business is reaping the best rewards possible.