Wayne Lockwood: Three Ways to Measure Success in the Engagement Economy

Tuesday, 5 September 2017

Three Ways to Measure Success in the Engagement Economy

Metrics, metrics everywhere, and still no way to know how you’re doing.

That might be an exaggeration, but it’s certainly the way it can feel sometimes, especially in an era where interactions, data, and real-time customer feedback are at an all-time high.

I recently attended an interview our Global Vice President of Product Marketing, Matt Zilli, did with theCUBE, on how to address success in the Engagement Economy.

In this blog, you’ll find three key tips that can help you examine your approach to engagement from Matt Zilli.

Engagement Is the Currency Companies Need to Thrive

In a sea of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, one unit of exchange stands out above the rest: engagement.

Anyone can send out a message to the masses, and it used to be that quantity was all you needed to make a mark. But today, with the sheer volume of digital marketing chatter out there, it’s true engagement that will make the difference. An organization can send out a million emails knowing that 100,000 people will open them and a smaller subset will even click on the content, but without a relevant narrative, the interaction is not sustainable.

As Matt put it, “We can go blast a message out all over the world, and just hope that one small percentage point of those folks will actually engage with us, and that’s just not going to work anymore. The real key movement forward is how the companies really deeply engage with their audience, with their customers, with their potential customers.”

AI to the Rescue

The good news: marketers are aware of how much data they have and are starting to use more of it than ever before to inform their marketing. The bad news? Data is still sitting silos within organizations. Siloed data means that marketers are still not getting one complete picture of their customer and still not letting them personalize their outreach for the best thing for each individual customer.

But there’s hope! And that hope is artificial intelligence. Matt says, “Over the next few years, a combination of AI technologies will do a lot of the heavy lifting, of looking at the data and gleaning insights from it and getting them to a marketer or somebody else driving customer experience so they naturally use it to do something informed for a specific customer.”

They Like Me, They Like Me Not

In the Engagement Economy, how do marketers know if they’re truly doing a good job? We’ve spoken previously about alignment metrics and the impact of customer advocacy, both of which point back to something critical: customer sentiment. It’s imperative that organizations find ways to get a real pulse on how both their current and potential customers feel about their brand. Luckily, there’s no shortage of options for how brands can acquire that feedback today, from market research to do-it-yourself surveys to simply getting out in the field and having conversations.

To quote Matt, “You have to seek the answers to find out how good of a job you’re doing versus looking at the efforts you’re putting in place. It can be a challenge for a lot of companies to get out there and try to gain an objective understanding.”

There will likely be surprises, but these surprises or gaps in perception present opportunities for brands to address and move the needle.

Want to Learn More?

Here’s the full video, and be sure to come back for more insights from the next video in our Engagement Economy video series with theCUBE. After you watch, I’d love to hear about what else you learned. Be sure to tell me in the comments!