Marketing engagement leads to revenue growth, making it a key focus for any great marketing strategy. By focusing on increasing engagement, marketers can enhance lead flow, improve conversion rates, and refine their understanding of their buyer journey. When people are excited about your brand, they become your biggest advocates. That’s why tracking engagement data is so important.
We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about marketing engagement – what it is, why you should care about it, and how businesses can measure and optimize it to achieve their goals.
What is Marketing Engagement?
In marketing, engagement refers to the level of interaction a customer or prospect has with your brand. This data is tracked and stored using tools like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or marketing automation platforms. Engagement data gives you insight into how prospects interact with your brand or products across various touchpoints.
How Does Marketing Engagement Work?
Engagement marketing creates meaningful interactions between brands and customers through interactive experiences and personalized touchpoints, including:
Online Engagement
- Website Visits and Page Views: How frequently prospects visit your site and what pages they explore.
- Page View Duration: The time spent on your site.
- Social Media Interactions: Likes, shares, comments, or reposts on platforms like LinkedIn, X (Twitter), or Facebook.
- Form Submissions: Actions like signing up for newsletters, downloading resources, or requesting a demo.
- Advertisement Interactions: Click-through rates (CTR) and impressions on ads.
- Email campaigns: Personalized emails encourage click-throughs and demonstrate relevance.
When a prospect reads a single blog post, it isn’t the most valuable touchpoint. But paired with other actions, like visiting product pages or requesting demos, it adds useful context.
Social platforms like LinkedIn and X (Twitter) establish rapport and authority by offering two-way engagement with informational posts, memes, polls, and more serious content like newsletters.
Combined with email and ad click-throughs, you’ll have a web of touchpoints that help your sales reps position the value of your product for that specific prospect.
Offline Engagement
Offline engagement involves interactions outside the digital space, such as:
- Billboard Views
- Conference Attendance
- Direct Mail Campaigns
- Print Advertisements
- Cold Calling
These traditional methods help online efforts by broadening the scope of engagement.
The Difference Between First-Party vs. Third-Party Data
There are two types of data, first-party data, which is considered engagement marketing data, and third party data, which is called intent data. You need both to understand how to reach your prospects effectively.
First-Party Data
This refers to interactions that occur directly with your brand—whether through your website, email campaigns, or trade shows. These are controlled touchpoints where data collection is straightforward.
Third-Party Data
Also known as intent data, this information supports your first-party data. It reflects broader industry interactions, such as prospects researching your product category on sites like G2. While less direct, 3rd-party data increases your understanding of customer behavior.
Why Does Engagement Matter?
Engagement data show the level of interest your prospects and customers have in your brand and products. Highly engaged individuals are more likely to convert, making this data essential for prioritizing leads.
Building Brand Recognition and Trust
Consistent engagement creates familiarity with your brand and fosters trust over time. Customers who see your brand as reliable are likelier to purchase and recommend your products or services.
Facilitating Self-Education
When you create ways for buyers to engage with your brand, they can educate themselves about your services and products by reading blogs, case studies, or watching videos, leading to better-informed decisions.
Driving Sales Growth
To increase sales, you probably need to increase marketing engagement. To boost engagement, focus on producing quality content across websites, ads, and social media. You can even share resources with industry communities on Slack and LinkedIn.
Providing Value to the Sales Team
Sales teams use engagement data to gauge their prospect’s level of interest and customize their approach. If a buyer visits specific product pages or downloads a whitepaper, the sales team can tailor discussions to address those topics. When engagement efforts address pain points and goals relevant to your target audience, the leads generated are more likely to align with your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Providing Value to the Marketing Team
Marketing teams can craft more effective campaigns and improve lead generation by analyzing which content resonates most with their audience. Additionally, engagement data helps with account segmentation and campaign optimization, improving the buyer journey and handoff to sales.
How to Measure Engagement
To effectively measure engagement, businesses need the right marketing tech stack that integrates tools for automation, analytics, social media management, event tracking, and data enrichment. Here are some of the key components:
- Marketing Automation Platforms: Tools like HubSpot or Marketo track and manage campaigns.
- Analytics Platforms: Google Analytics provides insights into website performance.
- Social Media Tools: Platforms like Sprout Social help measure post engagement.
- Video and Event Tools: Tools like Zoom and YouTube track webinar attendance and video views.
- Data Enrichment Tools: Clearbit or ZoomInfo add depth to customer profiles.
- Marketing Attribution Software: CaliberMind links engagement data to revenue outcomes.
Key Metrics for Engagement
- Conversion Rates
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
- Number of Clicks
- Social Media Engagement Rates
- Video Views
- Time Spent on Page
- Retention Rates
- NPS (Net Promoter Score)
- Meetings Booked and Meetings Held
- MQA (Marketing Qualified Account) to SQA (Sales Qualified Account) Conversion Rates
What is Engagement Scoring?
When your engagement data is floating around multiple systems, you can’t put together a clear story about your buyer.
It’s hard to build a clear view of your buyer journey when your engagement data is floating around in multiple systems. To make it more difficult, most B2B companies make purchases by buying committees.
Your marketing team may target one contact with an email campaign while your sales rep is already talking to another contact at the same company. Not only is this confusing to the buyers, who find themselves in different parts of the marketing and sales funnel, but it wastes internal resources and can even jeopardize a sales opportunity.
Account Engagement Score
In B2B marketing, engagement scoring consolidates data across platforms to provide a concise view of an account’s activity. This holistic approach is important for understanding buyer intent within complex sales processes involving multiple stakeholders.
Account engagement scoring aggregates engagement data at the account level, prioritizing high-value activities that indicate purchase intent. Tools like CaliberMind make this process seamless by:
- Integrating data from all platforms (MAP, CRM, website, etc.).
- Consolidating account-level insights.
- Providing a single source of truth for marketing and sales teams.
Best Practices for Marketing Engagement
To get the most out of your engagement marketing strategies:
- Focus on audience needs: Build your marketing strategy around understanding and addressing your target audience’s specific requirements, challenges, and desires to create meaningful connections.
- Maintain brand authenticity: Develop and stick to a genuine brand personality across all marketing channels to build recognition and deliver a unified customer journey.
- Embrace automation tools: Implement digital solutions to enhance your marketing efficiency. These tools help deliver targeted messaging, build relationships, and track performance indicators effectively.
- Foster community content: Create opportunities for customers to share their experiences with your brand. This organic content builds credibility and strengthens community engagement.
- Measure and optimize: Regularly review engagement data to understand campaign performance. Use these insights to refine your approach and enhance customer interactions.
CaliberMind's Approach to Engagement Scoring
Remember, the goal of engagement isn’t to simply increase interactions but to create meaningful connections with your audience. By providing value, addressing pain points, and customizing your approach based on engagement data, you can build stronger relationships with your customers, ultimately driving business growth.
Want to learn how to understand your engagement data and implement an account-based strategy? CaliberMind Engagement does the hard work of connecting all your information so you can optimize your marketing efforts and reduce buyer friction.
