Marketing activities as a general principle are designed to generate leads. And leads can be the derivative of customer engagement. However, just because these are both true, doesn’t always mean your marketing team needs to push really hard to increase engagement just to get leads. Let’s take a deeper look at these two important pieces of your brand’s health.
When your team focuses on an engagement marketing strategy, their goal is to create content that provides value to your prospective customers and your current clients. Part of this activity is deepening the relationship between individual and company, or individual and sales professional. When the engagement activity-flow is successful, the brand, and salesperson typically earn the trust of the prospective customer.
Successful engagement is knowing your customer so well that your content does a masterful job of inviting them to take action (consuming your content). It’s like you are asking your neighbor to come over for coffee and bagels on Saturday morning. There’s an offer from one side, and an interested party to consume the offer on the other side. When it works, it’s like magic!
7 engagement and lead generation tips to help your team.
- (Tip #1) Engagement and Lead Generation are not equally valued activities since engagement, thought leadership, content creation, and branding will not always create leads as a direct result of engagement.
- (Tip #2) Engagement and Lead Generationdo cross-over and assist each other both on your website and off your website.
- (Tip #3) Engagementis how your company keeps the brand relevant and trusted in the industry. It also helps provide support for conversations with customers and prospects. Additionally, this is an important factor in overall SEO.
- (Tip #4) Engagement is not a pure lead-gen activity. Just like lead-gen activities are not designed for pure engagement.
- (Tip #5) Increasing Engagement in its simplest form is creating an ongoing flow of content that your customers interact with and trust.
- (Tip #6) Increasing Engagementalso helps your brand and/or product remain top of mind. This is especially important when a customer is considering your company and another in the buying process. Increased engagement during this process correlates to a quality lead for your sales team.
- (Tip #7) Engagement and Lead Generation Activities:Create a list of marketing activities that are both on your website and off of your website that you know will work best for reaching out to and establishing trust and respect with your primary audiences. This list will provide an overarching big picture of your entire ecosystem at work, and how these activities overlap and function together to accomplish both increased engagement and increased lead-generation.
So, let’s get back to the original question. Do engagement and lead generation work together? The short answer is, absolutely. Do your best to dissect all of your marketing activities to determine how you are using them within your marketing ecosystem and you will see a direct correlation of how they work together.
Join us for our next blog in this series on engagement, where we will unpack How Do You Determine If an Engagement Activity is Valuable, or not.