Top five lessons to learn from audience engagement analytics

In fact, 58% of enterprises are seeing a dramatic increase in customer loyalty and retention from the use of customer analytics. Know your audience and know them well. If you do, you have a greater likelihood of:

• Creating relevant content

• Choosing channels most interactive with your audience

• Increasing brand awareness

• Shaping products to better serve your customers

• Dramatically increasing revenue

• Ensuring brand longevity

With these six factors, your brand will skillfully build and maintain an active customer base. Let’s look at the top five lessons you should learn about audience engagement.

1. Why it’s important to track audience engagement

The stronger relationship a brand can build with a customer, the more active they will be with each other. This is important when you are trying to build your brand and solidify its presence in a competitive environment. Therefore, engagement data must be collected and tracked.

The beauty of audience analytics is they help you determine: the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, if your channels are allowing you to connect with intended customers, campaign returns, if your digital content is meeting user expectations and customer churn. Without these metrics campaigns can go downhill, but with them they can exceed the greatest of expectations.

2. Meeting customer expectations

Technological innovations have opened a Pandora’s box of consumer touchpoints. Everywhere you turn a new opportunity to learn about a brand evolves. As a consumer, it can be overwhelming, unsure who to trust or where to turn for accurate information.

Learn enough about your intended audience to interpret their wants and needs. Not what you have to offer but what they want and why. The bar has risen to sky-high levels and consumer expectations are not likely to go back down. Staying on top of your analytics will help you anticipate the needs of your potential customers and have both your product and messaging ready.

3. Examples of audience engagement

Before your audience can engage with your brand first open lines of communication – touchpoints, if you will. This involves more than social media comments or emails, it is any type of interaction between a brand and a consumer, it can include:

• User sessions

• Downloads

• Live chat responses

• Virtual webinar attendance

• Website activity

• Social media responses and usage

• QR code scans

• Email sign-ups

• In-person attendance

• Landing page/email clicks

• Surveys

• Reviews/testimonials

• Video views

• Purchase points

• Customer service

While audience engagement is comprised of individual interactions, it is the sum of these parts that make up a customer journey. The customer journey is your chance to shine. Choose your touchpoints carefully and take the time to place a ‘human and need’ with each data point. You will soon find ways to strengthen the ties that bind the brand and the consumer.

4. Engagement analytics

These types of analytics help analyze how your audience is interacting with your content and, more importantly, who your audience is. The objective is to use data to help refine and direct your marketing efforts, as well as reach your company’s short- and long-term goals.

It’s important to remember ‘data’ is a representation of a human being on the other side of a number. For example, demographics may show that a certain country buys your product more than others. Dig deep and ask why. What attracts them to your product? Are you filling a specific need for them or are you simply communicating better with them? How are their needs different from other parts of the world? Why have they chosen your brand? How can you replicate that in other countries?

By taking analytics a step further than numbers on a screen you will find out more than the ‘who, how, when and where’ of customer engagement, you will also find out the all-important ‘why’.

5. Engagement analytic tools

Finding analytic tools isn’t difficult – in fact, they are everywhere. The trick is to match the tool with the goal. Social media channels typically come with their own set of diagnostic tools, although navigating the learning curve can be time-consuming. Facebook and Instagram are famous for their ever-changing systems of analytics and algorithms. If you think keeping up with the Kardashians is complicated, just try keeping up with social channels’ revolving algorithms!

If you aren’t satisfied with social channels’ analytics, plenty of other tools are available. Brand24 is a popular tool that alerts you to brand discussions and mentions, among other features. Brandwatch is another high-performing tool that collects brand mentions, segments conversations and analyzes data using artificial intelligence.

For analytic platforms outside of social channels, there are several tools to choose from. Segment is a top-rated tool that tracks customer behavior throughout the entire buying journey. Kissmetrics and Tableau are additional diagnostic tools worth checking out.

Wrapping up

Understanding and engaging your audience is key to brand loyalty. The jewel in the crown of audience engagement is when they do the marketing for you. Consumers can be extremely faithful to brands and word of mouth can spread like wildfire. You must work strategically to get to that point. Getting to the top and staying there shouldn’t be complicated if analytics are the foundation of a solid marketing and development plan.

Get to know your customers as humans instead of data points, communicate the right messages and they will come to you for answers, products and everything in between.

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