Engagement

Consumer engagement deals with the psychological effect from company to customer within a process of relationship exchange. Good engagement over time produces a sense of connection with the brand or company. This can happen even without a purchase. You target potential customers who fit within your target audience. One way to improve engagement is to use inbound marketing strategies. This helps generate leads from all interested people and then turn them into customers. More on this in the last paragraph.

The 3 aspects of engagement

To build a customer relationship through engagement, there are three aspects that matter. These are trust, knowledge and brand promise. The foundation of a customer relationship is the brand promise, after this comes knowledge and if there is trust, a loyal customer has been created.

Brand promise
To build a relationship with your customers, the brand promise must already be established. This promise comes from the "why" of your company. What does the company stand for, what does the company offer and how does the company fulfill the customer's need. This allows a potential customer to interact with your company, see what you stand for and put into perspective whether these align with his or her personal values and needs. This ensures that interest is generated.

Knowledge
The next step is to give the person, in whom interest has now been generated, knowledge. But not just any knowledge, knowledge that connects with the customer. For example, this is at a time when a customer is sharing knowledge about his or her situation and the company is sharing knowledge that matches it. In this example, when both parties listen to each other, there is a meaningful interaction. The more often meaningful interactions occur between the brand and the customer, the closer the relationship becomes.

Trust
When customer and brand are increasingly aligned thanks to shared knowledge, expectations arise. People start expecting you to keep your (brand) promises and do what you say, or even promise. For example, when a customer has a problem and it is solved well by friendly customer service, it creates trust.

Inbound marketing

The marketing strategy called inbound marketing attracts leads and buyers to the company. Its goal is to build a long-term relationship with the customer. This is done by sharing relevant information and ultimately products or services, which provides a solution to a customer's pain point. Simply put, an inbound marketing strategy consists of the following steps:

• The first step is to determine the target audience - Create multiple buyer personas to determine the perfect buyers who will be attracted by your inbound marketing strategy
• Next, create a campaign plan for all the necessary content for each stage in the buyer journey
• Improve and refresh this content by optimizing existing content based on reports about the customer and his or her behavior
• Incorporate various methods of marketing automation such as KPIs, workflows and scrum to simplify this process