It's engagement that drives business today not how much people remember commercials

02/26/10 09:51 AM Filed in: Social Media

World-class organizations unleash their potential for growth by optimizing their customer relationships. Organizations that have optimized engagement have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth. Their customers buy more, spend more, return more often, and stay longer. This is the metric that is most important today for marketers not how well consumers remember or like your commercials.

For customers, feelings are facts. And any metric that does not account for this aspect of human nature is fundamentally flawed. Any metric designed to measure customer engagement must pass two very important tests. First, the metric must be clear and straightforward. The entire organization, from the senior executives to the frontline employees, must understand and relate to the measurement being used, and it helps if the metric is also easy to communicate to the outside marketplace. Second, the metric must have strong links to key business outcomes. Spending time and effort conducting measurements that are not profoundly connected to business performance is all too common, and wasting resources measuring something that doesn’t matter is worse than conducting no measurement at all.

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In order to truly leverage engagement and engagement metrics an organization has to be willing to invest both time and money into social media as a strategy component of their marketing plan. It will mean a lot of trial and error in order to get it right and even when you do think you have it right you're going to have to continually optimize your the channel to ensure you stay ahead of the competitors.

Old marketing metrics like reach and frequency and "how well consumers remember and like your TV spots" mean little in a world where consumer behavior is changing so rapidly. If you have to spend a lot of time "selling" executives to the ROI on social media than you're already late to the party and the boat is leaving the harbor.

Tags: Engagement