Let’s talk about engagement, specifically engagement in today’s digital age. Engagement has become a huge indicator of success for brands today. This makes perfect sense, as the more engaged your prospects and customers are, the more likely they are to become loyal fans of your brand.
While we benefit from new technology that enables marketers to leverage entirely new modes and methods of engagement, the fact remains that far too few brands are getting the engagement results they desire. According to 2021 HubSpot marketing statistics, only 61% of marketers believe their marketing strategy is effective. Yikes! So, how can your brand set itself apart to be seen and heard? And more importantly, how will you know if you are effectively accomplishing engagement?
After all these years, content is still king. We know that quality content is critical to any marketing strategy, and we continue to see its importance standing out. The current market is saturated with content, and successful brands must make sure the content they’re delivering is entertaining and attention-grabbing. Staying on the pulse of current trends in consumer habits is vital.
In the future of marketing, brands that authentically connect with people and provide useful content will excel. This will require brands to get creative and adopt new strategies and techniques.
But where do you start? How exactly do we measure engagement? The following are some of the ways that you can effectively measure engagement.
1. Interaction Across Marketing Channels
How can you know if you’re successfully building audience relationships? In an age of influencers, it can be easy to only focus on having a massive following on social media as a business. But these vanity metrics can be misleading. You need to realize that social media engagement is more important than followers.
Take note of who is interacting with your published content: email, social media, podcasts, videos, etc. Who is liking, sharing, and commenting on your content? What forms of media are they engaging with the most? Do the same people engage on multiple platforms, or do you have different audiences for different marketing channels?
Remember, not everyone consumes content the same way or on the same platforms. Therefore, it’s essential to wring out your content across multiple marketing channels to maximize your potential for audience engagement.
Casted allows users to take podcast clips that are relevant to their message and easily embed them into blogs or socials, this makes it easier for your audience to engage with your content in their preferred way. An engaged audience will regularly share your content, join the conversation in the comments, and help get the word out to potential new leads.
2. Pipeline Influenced by Content
We all know that modern customers don’t like being sold to. They want to be empowered to make up their minds about a product or service. While once a linear process, the buyer's journey is now seen as a never-ending cycle that places equal emphasis on your prospects and customers. Podcasts are a fantastic way to drive demand and influence buying decisions. But you guessed it, to attract and hold your audience’s attention to lead them through the pipeline, your podcast content needs to be engaging. A.K.A. authentic, entertaining, and educational.
So how do you know that the content you’re putting out is reaching your target audience, and more importantly grabbing their attention for long enough that they engage with it? Anytime you launch new content, you need to measure its success. Analytics tools can show you metrics like the number of downloads, podcast listens, blog views, and videos streamed. The more engaged your audience is, the higher those numbers are going to be.
Without this hard data, you won’t get an accurate picture of how you are doing. More importantly, it will make it harder to prove your value to your own brand and justify future investment initiatives. Why? The reason is simple: If you can’t prove your marketing initiatives, you risk marketing budgets not being renewed and could miss that coveted buy-in.
3. Won Revenue
It’s every marketer's dream to build a campaign that increases revenue (sales goals) and creates more loyal customers (retention goals). When your brand can effectively use content to connect to individuals and speak to their specific needs and desires, it can make or break you when it comes time for these would-be customers to make their purchases. Campaigns are a great and easy way to start to uncover how your podcast content is performing against your goals. We further discuss this in our podcast with expert guest Mike Volpe.
Think of it this way: Every season of the podcast is a content centerpiece, and all the content we wring out of it — whether that’s a social post, blog, or email — is part of that campaign. We’ll tag every piece of content into a single campaign so we can see how the content from our podcast is working together to keep our audience engaged and ultimately impact the buying process.
We have published several podcasts and items offering specific advice on this topic, one which addresses how to show attribution of your podcast. Another one suggests setting up a visual dashboard to track things like sponsor ad clicks, the number of conversions acquired, the number of shares, top content clips, and more.
4. Referrals
If you’re receiving referrals, you’re doing it right. Advocacy is the holy grail of engagement. Customers or even prospects willing to give a referral about your product or services is a huge indicator of a highly engaged audience. It means that you’ve successfully “earned your audience” by meeting their needs.
This kind of engagement, in our opinion, is much more beneficial than downloads. “You can’t pay your employees with downloads,” says podcaster and marketing extraordinaire Jay Baer. “Look at your spike in SEO; look at your spike in people mentioning the show to your customer success team. There are all these other signals that indicate that the show is doing something for your brand beyond just how many people downloaded the show.”
5. Who’s Contributing to Your Content?
Podcasts are so much more than brand awareness and subscribers. They’re about relationships, loyalty, learning, and everything else in between. Podcasting opens the door to creating genuine relationships with industry experts, thought leaders, and ideal clients when you ask them to be a guest on your show. Plot twist: your guests are your audience. When prospects are willing to do interviews, you can shift the relationship from customer to collaborator.
And guess what? There’s tremendous value behind every word you and your guests share behind the mic. When prospects are willing to be on your podcast to give interviews and share quotes, they are fully engaging with your brand (and they’re buying into it).
We’ve been lucky to work with many brands who are highly engaged with us. When a client is willing to come onto our podcast to have conversations about what’s working (and what’s not), it’s a huge indicator that they are devoted to the brand. These conversations then not only fuel our content flywheel, but strengthen our relationships, and help us develop a loyal customer base.
We are now entering a thrilling time in the industry. The emerging digital landscape is opening doors to so many possibilities to create winning content that connects with consumers, right where they are — be it at home listening to a podcast, online reading a blog, or wherever. And as you move forward into this new and exciting digital frontier, the brands that will rise will be those that keep their finger on the pulse of the current trends by constantly measuring data and analytics, then pivoting to evolve alongside new techniques as they emerge.
As you look forward, it never hurts to have a power player in your corner. At Casted, we help brands take action on their content to squeeze the most value out of all material. You can even use the Casted platform to share episodes of a podcast, create clips (or a new Audiogram!), uncover deep analytics, and even assign an engagement score to every listener.
For more on how Amplified Marketing can change your game, check out The Amplified Marketing Playbook.
