Customer Engagement Is Customer Enhancement

When we think about the benefits of customer engagement, we tend to focus on the benefits to the brand: improved conversion rates, better customer retention, lower costs of acquisition. Too often we forget that customer engagement only works if it brings real benefits to the customer, benefits that go beyond those associated with the company’s product.

When customer engagement works properly, that’s exactly what happens. In fact, our goal is always that customer engagement should result in customer enhancement.

The act of engaging with the brand, even before a purchase has been made, will make that lead better equipped, better informed and better placed to lead a better life.

That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Much of customer engagement takes the form of information-sharing. The videos and booklets that we create are intended not just to draw eyeballs and keep attention on a screen. They’re intended to teach and inform so that when the lead pulls away, he or she has a smile on their face and a new thought in their head — and they should also have a sense of gratitude towards the brand for helping them to understand something that they might not even have been aware they needed to know.

They feel that gratitude at the point of engagement — when they watch the video — and they feel it again when they use the information we’ve supplied, when they read the financial pages of a newspaper with a new understanding or reach for the right questions when they’re talking to a computer technician.

Brands Should Be The Ivy League Schools Of Their Sectors

You can think of it as a bit like the relationship an alumnus has with their alma mater.

Students buy knowledge from a college which they acquire over a period and for a specific purpose. In theory, the relationship between the college and the student should end on graduation: the student has the knowledge they’ve paid for.

But the experience of acquiring that knowledge and the value that knowledge brings them as they continue through life create a special bond between the alumnus and their old college. So strong is that bond that universities can even tap their former customers for more fees long after those customers have finished paying for the product.

We take it for granted that institutions of higher education enhance the people who pass through them. But in a smaller way, brands should take the same attitude towards the leads and customers who pass through their outlets and across their websites.

We should see that engagement as an opportunity to improve the client, to create an experience that they enjoy and to give them knowledge that they appreciate. If we can put customers in a position to feel that every time they engage with a brand they come away better than they were before — whether that’s through being able to make better purchase decisions, feel more confident in conversations, or get more out of their product — we won’t just be enhancing the client. We’ll also be enhancing the brand.

Click here and get your FREE copy of ASTELO's practical guide:
"101 Content Marketing - The New Face of Digital Marketing".