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As we head into 2025, there is one word that should be firmly on the lips of all markets: engagement.
At all times you must ensure your marketing activities are engaging. And at all times your marketing must be driving customer engagement.
Whether you’re a targeting lenders, brokers or estate agents – the principle is the same. Think engagement.
Therefore, in this article we will address:
Why engagement is important
What do we mean by customer engagement
Where do you start?
How can you deliver marketing that drives engagement?
How can you drive customer engagement with your marketing?
11 Ideas For Driving Engagement
How do you measure it?
Why Is Engagement Important?
Quite simply, engagement really does matter.
Delivering engagement helps you build strong relationships with your target audience – at all stages through that funnel.
If your marketing does not deliver engagement, it will not get the cut through. And your messages will not stick in the memory banks of your audience. If you are not building customer engagement, you will be firefighting, on the back foot and be starved for time.
Building customer engagement delivers long term strategic benefits to you and your brand.
This marketing philosophy delivers market share growth in more efficient ways. It makes marketing budgets go further and create time efficiencies for marketers.
What is Customer Engagement?
This is all about delivering a customer experience that exceeds expectation – under promise and over deliver.
From a marketing perspective, engagement begins when a prospect first becomes aware of your brand and then starts to understand what you do and why you are special. It then continues to their first piece of business with you and for long afterwards too.
Engagement begins with acquisition and using nurturing techniques to retain and generate repeat usage. Your ultimate goal with engagement is to build long lasting relationships with customers that add real value to the bottom line. And do this in a tailored way according to where the customer lies within that sales funnel of yours.
What Is The Starting Point?
Everything starts with your customer and revolves around relationships. Strong relationships drive trust. And strong relationships need effective communication – which includes listening.
Therefore, to deliver engaging marketing and drive engagement involves a good understanding of customer needs, preferences, behaviours and pain points.
How Can You Deliver Marketing That Drives Engagement?
To deliver marketing that your customers want to engage with simply means being customer centric. It means doing more than just promoting products.
It means putting yourself in their shoes. And walk in those shoes.
To drive engagement means connecting emotionally (by solving problems) and being human. It means having a two-way dialogue and resonating with the right messages at the right time.
Engaging marketing does not tell facts. It tells stories. It helps your audience visualise who your products are suitable for. It is not dull, it entertains.
This is not a revolutionary new approach. You simply need to use your marketing skills to drive engagement levels with your target audience. It is about having a long term, strategic approach to marketing, rather than driving short terms sales wins.
Driving Customer Engagement Through Marketing
Engagement must be a philosophy, not an afterthought. It should be engrained in what you do. By building engagement, your audiences will be engaged in the sales process when they want, and by which channels they prefer.
It is the difference between a shop assistant hovering versus the one sitting back, offering help and being there when the customer does need help. It is being helpful not pushy.
This means connecting with audiences who want to hear from you, in relevant, meaningful, interesting ways – and in the places they want to hear from you, when they are ready to do so.
Some Ideas For Driving Engagement
There are different ways to drive engagement, and you need to do the right thing that aligns with your goals and brand. Nonetheless, here are some ideas:
1. Think engagement.
2. Segment
3. Be Human
4. Be Helpful
5. Listen
6. Personalise
7. Have A Strong Consistent Brand Voice
8. Be empathetic.
9. Have Q&A Session
10. Involve Your Audience
11. Be relevant
Think Engagement
Make it the norm to engage. So, on your sign offs and checklists, have this question – "is my marketing engaging with my audience, or is it a tad dull and be of no value to my audience. Will my marketing efforts be welcomed and well received – or be an unwelcome intrusion to the lives of my target audience?"
Segment
You will need to use different techniques to build engagement amongst different segments, based on your customer’s stage in the sales funnel.
Driving engagement marketing begins by building brand awareness through to building brand advocacy and repeat business. So, segment your audience and have different messages for these. Batch and blast do not engage.
Humanise your brand
Share your brand values. Be transparent. Avoid jargon and use the language your customers use – not fancy words based on brand guidelines.
Write how you speak. Bring your people to life more. And show – don’t tell: Bring your story telling to life with case studies that really tell the story, not the hard facts. Paint a picture for engagement.
4. Be Helpful
Provide educational content that helps your customers.
Listen
Listen to your customers. And prove that you are listening by telling them what you heard and doing as a result. Get out there and immerse yourself your customers. And do the right type of research, not tick in the box research but the type where you get to know your audience. Give psychographic research a go in 2025.
Personalise
Where you can, personalise your messages. I am not talking about personalisation tokens but making references that demonstrate previous interactions with you.
Have A Strong Consistent Brand Voice
Having lots of messages makes it harder to build engagement. Instead, have clear and consistent messages. Be relevant to your audience and being relevant means thinking segmentation and knowing what really is relevant to your audience.
Creating a brand voice also means becoming a thought-leader in the industry. Demonstrate your expertise to build more trust.
Be Empathetic
Time is a real issue these days. So, keep your content short. And skimmable. Also, show that you know and understand the challenges that your audience is facing today. 9. Have Q&A Sessions
Get real engagement by offering Q&A sessions. You can try this via social media but workshops and events work best – but this is more than just having 5 minutes at the end of a dull sales presentation. Make the whole thing interesting and interactive.
Involve Your Audience
Talk to your customers about your marketing and get feedback. Get your audience involved in product design too. Asking your audience “what do you think?” is a really powerful question to ask.
Be Relevant
It is hard to be engaging if your message is irrelevant. So always make sure your message has a goal to achieve, with context.
Measuring Engagement
When it comes to measurement, think about your marketing & sales metrics as well as your customer metrics.
Marketing Metrics: If you use CRM tools, you can apply lead scoring to give you all powerful metrics at a customer level.
When it comes to email marketing, your platform may be able to show you different levels of engagement. Social Media metrics like “likes” and comments can be of value.
Website metrics are also of real value. See how many repeat visitors you are having, through to session times. Use heat mapping to see how your audiences engage with your website and email marketing.
Sales Metrics: Look at repeat business. How many customers come back for more.
Customer Metrics: Customer satisfaction surveys that show NPS are very useful.Look at Customer Effort Score too, which is like NPS, but assesses how easy you are to deal with. When doing such research to measure this, make sure you continue to segment so you can measure NPS and CES for the different segments.
Also think about customer engagement measures for those who are not yet customers. DO bespoke studies to understand how they perceive your brand, have been engaging with it (online and events) and likelihood of providing business in the future.
IN 2025 THINK ENGAGEMENT
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