Creating an Experience that Inspires and Motivates
By Fred Ackourey
This post aims to provide you with a new perspective on the meaning of engagement, deepening its definition for the purpose of building a foundation to deliver a richer customer experience.
I have a problem with the term “engagement”. So many, from ad agencies to Google and beyond tout the virtues of engagement. How to measure it, how to get it, how having it generates sales nirvana, don’t make me puke. Last month, a marketing executive from well known ad platform told me, that a customer was engaged if they viewed 5 pages or more in one visit. Does that sound right to you? I mean after 5 pages on a website I’m scrambling for the favorites button, aren’t you? No? Yet at the time of this post that is exactly how Google measures “engagement” via page depth and visit duration, see the chart below (to be fair GA does offer tools to measure social interactions which have more meaning to us than “Engagement”).
How Google Analytics Measures Engagement – You’ve Got to be Kidding Me!
Engagement means something, but at the time of this post its digital marketing definition is fuzzy at best and generally ambiguous. So, first lets give “engagement” meaning so that we can move marketing forward using it as a tool to create a better UX.
Engagement Defined
The incredible advantage and great differentiation between digital media and most other forms of media is its bidirectional channel. Not only can a user visit your site and consume its content, but if you choose, an interaction between that user and your machine can be created; thus developing a channel with a feedback loop . The feedback loop can then pass timely and relevant information back and forth that can be used to augment | enrich | better control the user’s experience. Engagement, in My world of digital marketing, means your content has made a physical connection with the user, established the feedback loop and enabled the encoder – decoder relationship. It says nothing about the quality | type | or state of the connection; for all we know (and it happens all too often) engagement turns out to mean: “…yeah we dropped a few cookies on ya, thanks dude!”
The State of the Connection
Once a connection is made and we have “engagement” (by my definition) communication is supported and the real magic can begin. From this point on everything digital marketing is possible for we can exchange content that grabs the user’s attention and provides stimulus to create response behaviors. In other words, we can give the user an awesome experience that not only inspires but motivates them.
Currently, many ecommerce businesses and websites totally ignore this opportunity electing to pay more attention to the format of their content, than to the value it delivers to the user. This paradigm, created as a result of the strong desire to rank high in search rankings, is shifting. There is now evidence that Google is adapting a more traditional ratings model to page rankings, giving higher page authority scores to more customer friendly, popular sites than ones with massive back links and keyword stuffs. Media owners who do not re-orient their content creation strategy to be more aligned with the state of the user at the time they view the content, will find their page rankings and SERPs in decline. Therefore, knowing the state of mind (I want to say state of being) of your user at the time of engagement can be a great advantage because you can then tailor appropriate stimulus (messages) to maximize the desired behavior (a better customer experience). What this amounts to is the ability to deliver content to users who at the time of consumption find the content compelling and allow it to stimulate desired responses.
Content which users find of value requires vision, strategy and planning. An acute knowledge of where the customer is and where she is going is required. However, markets are extremely competitive and awareness of this knowledge is not generally solely yours. Throw in the fact that many of your competitors are plagiarizing your content and you soon find your signals (messages) are now noise.
You need to stand out to be successful. You must have the ability to create differentiated experiences. But what else can be done if everyone is copying your content. One way is to optimize your messaging for multiple channels using it in such a way as to create a new experience, one unique to you. Using multiple mediums in creative and harmonious ways can have as much a differentiating effect on your competitive position, as your choice of background color and copy in ads. The trick is in knowing how to use a combination of channel and message in an asynchronous environment in a way that captures their attention and delights the user. Marketing this way will not only increase the frequency of your message, but elevates it above single channel noise because multiple channels are piping your message in a new and harmonious way; its like the difference of hearing the song Happy Birthday played by an orchestra vs a guitar. Harmonizing the channels, as I term it is a topic for a future posts, but is extremely effective in sales construction.
In conclusion, engagement is only the beginning, a physical connection between you and the user where the user has placed some attention. Knowing the state of the connection and more importantly the state of mind of the user is much more important. It gives us the information we need to deliver the right messages to them. Luckily, the nature of an online connection is such that it can provide the necessary feedback about the encoder and decoder enabling us to understand the state of mind of the user and providing them with an experience that deepens our relationship. Not all messages are created equally. Plagiarized content, a bi-product of the monkey see monkey do internet, makes delivering high-fidelity messaging very difficult. However, taking a multilevel (multichannel) approach to message delivery creates an opportunity to differentiate our messaging and turn a single message into a harmonious multidimensional story with more reach and frequency.
Do you harmonize your messages in a multichannel way? Do you know of other examples of this type of marketing? Do you think this is utter crap? Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to hearing from you.
Categories: social media
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