The old marketing funnel, in which the goal was to achieve widespread awareness with the hopes of converting a few into customers, has been turned on its head. In today’s world of clutter and choice, potential customers are either engaged or not. So marketers need to focus not just on increased agility, speed and strength but also engagement, which, as Forrester Research points out, is made up of four behavioral elements: involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence.
Engagement measures not just the quantity of time spent with your brand, but the quality of time spent. Quality, as in what are the most productive things a marketer can do that ultimately affects what a customer does at the moment of truth: buy or recommend a brand to others.
What this means is that engagement is the mentality needed to drive short-term marketing performance. And its metrics are also leading indicators of value creation for the long-term.
What’s the best way to achieve engagement? Adopt the marketing mind-set of a retailer. I mean retailing in its broadest sense: a unique shopping situation selling goods directly to the individual or business that’ll actually be using them.
Success only comes from thinking like a marketer — developing a strategy to differentiate you from competitors in a way that is relevant to your target — but then applying it with the speed of a retailer, launching with partial data and improving things based on real-world results.
Marsha Lindsay, Build Your Brand by Thinking Like a Fighter, AdAge