Ezi Pix Blog

Engagement Marketing

Three Tips for a Successful Engagement Marketing Plan

By Julie Watson

Based on a conversation with Marketing Consultant

Patrick Zuluaga of “PMZ Marketing”

You may not be getting married, but these days you need to be ‘Engaged’! It’s the new buzz word being used to describe a type of relationship building with your potential customers and works with all of the new social media that we hear about and use today. Engagement Marketing is basically building a relationship one to one with a potential customer, having dialogue and interaction, all prior to them buying or referring your product or service.

Patrick says that the key to the best use of engagement marketing is to guide them to your automated online presence and it can be quite easy. I have put together three tips based on our conversation to help you gain better marketing results. Beware! The tide of online networking and social interaction and sharing is rising and you may drown if you don’t have a plan of action. To stay afloat you need an online presence to market yourself or your business.  

These tips should give you a good head start on what to do to ensure you don’t sink. As consumers have more and more choice about what marketing they view, when they view it and how they view it, you need to make sure you don’t miss the boat.

• Multi-Channel Plan

You need to understand your target market. Who are they, what do they want and where are they looking? There is nothing new about this step. It has always been the key to running a successful marketing campaign. You need to be very specific so that you can be most effective. If you have a wide audience that you can target, break it into smaller segments so that you can achieve better results by being more relevant to each group. A portrait photographer may think that every person is a possible prospective client. By breaking it down into segments, the photographer can then choose different mediums to target different groups. They may choose to specialise in ‘Baby Portraits’, so they need to target new Mums.

Once you fully understand who you are targeting, the next step is to look at multichannels to reach them. It’s no longer your choice as to how you want to reach out to them. You have to find where they are and use those channels. What other websites might be targeting the same crowd as you? Join in on their forums and as you do this you will begin to form relationships with them, gain their trust and understand what it is they want. Once you have started dialogue with them, you can interact so they become interested in what you have to offer and want to know more about your own services or products that may help them with their needs. Twitter, FaceBook, emails, blogging, forums…all of these could be used as part of your multichannel plan to reach out to your audience and drive them back to your marketing message (your website).

Remember that at this stage you are only making conversation to find out the type of people you are dealing with. Never try to sell anyone anything through a forum or blog or on your social media or you will loose friends very quickly. Build the relationship and make sure that you only offer your webpage after the conversation has become relative to what you have to offer.

• Web Presence

Now that you know that the information, products or services you provide is relevant to your prospective customers needs, you need to reach out to them and show them what you have to offer. Your most important medium is your web presence, as statistics are now showing that people are in front of their computer for longer per day than their TV.

Your web presence should be the centre of all your marketing messages. This is where you can capture those people and engage them to take action in preparation to buy and influence others through referral marketing. You can educate and inform then and convince them of your products and services and then use a call to action to get them to buy. Make sure you offer great value to them when they visit your site or they will soon leave.

• Call to Action

Your messages need to be transaction driven. Once you gain visitors to your site or presence and you give them the information that is relevant and valuable to them, you need to have a call to action so that they are more likely to respond and interact or buy your product or service. Some typical action driven messages might be; “Buy Now”, “Limited Time”, “half price for one week only”, “click here to register”, “visit our blog for more information” or “click here to view my portfolio” and all of these messages give the customer an action to take to get further information or make a purchase. You are basically telling them what the next step is that they need to take to get the offer and when they need to do it. Your website is a marketing engine and, as control is being lost to marketers, it becomes all the more important that you capture these buyers who now control everything regarding their purchasing experience.

Many people will visit and purchase from a site that has been referred to them by a friend. Adding a link to share your site or information with others is a relatively new and exciting way to introduce visitors to your marketing message. You are not simply ‘sending to a friend’ through an email, but able to automatically share your page to their social media and forum friends. By adding a call to action ‘share this’, you have your interested prospect saying to all their friends “hey, look at this great site I found with interesting information about………” and it will link directly to your website/presence, blog or portfolio.

You will multiply your sales by automating the process, so that selling one product becomes as easy as selling thousands of products. If you are selling photographic images, then the process should be automated so that the customer receives their print or downloadable image quickly and with a minimum of fuss. The process is the same for every customer, no matter how many sales you make, keeping your costs and time to a minimum.

The three main areas that you want to engage your target market into are; engaging to dialogue, engaging to buy and engaging to refer and I wish you all the best in doing this by using the three steps in this article.