Articles

Engagement Defined

MarketingNPV | 07 Jul 2008

“Engagement” is a concept rapidly gaining favor among marketers and media buyers. Some see it as an eventual substitute for the increasingly irrelevant gross rating point (GRP), while others (such as the Advertising Research Foundation) use the term to refer to the extent to which people are stimulated by advertising they see on TV. Both uses are worthy of further exploration, but in the results-now world we live in, engagement needs more tangible context.

In the most literal sense of the word, “engagement” should be behaviorally defined and focused on measuring the evolution of the behavioral relationship between prospect and company. In this form, it is a measure of how customer segments or individuals are progressing through one or more desired paths toward a closer, more commercial relationship with the product or services provider.

Note that behavioral doesn’t necessarily mean buying something; it can also mean going to a Web site, entering into an anonymous dialogue, inquiring for further information, or any number of pre-sale activities that can be predictive of purchasing something. In the trackable Internet age, such behavioral measures of engagement hold the potential to displace awareness and brand preference as interim measures of marketing effectiveness.

Measuring
Engagement stages may include any part of the buying process, from initial inquiry to placing an order or reorder to referring the company to a friend or colleague (yes, Net Promoter is, in this definition, an engagement metric). We can then measure not only which stage buyers are at in their progression from prospects to customers, but also the velocity at which they are moving toward the end goal. The result is an insightful window into the value of the customer pipeline and the impact that marketing efforts may have on increasing it.

Relevant Link
MarketingNPV | Engagement The Emperors New Clothes

Source
MarketingNPV | Emerging Metrics - 7 Topics of Increasing Relevance