Social Media Marketing: Brands Must Ensure Consumer Engagement Across the Customer Lifecycle

Audience engagement has fast become the all-important KPI in social medial marketing.

There’s a reason for that: When measuring campaign success, marketers have realized that consumer engagement is arguably the metric that has the single biggest impact on ROI.

This engagement-first focus can be seen in recent product launches and newly-developed services from all the major social media platforms.

Twitter, for example, has a new in-house initiative called ArtHouseOpens a new window that helps brands partner with influencers and content creators. Marketers can use this service to create higher-quality content that will lead to improved levels of audience engagement on the platform.

LinkedIn has also been making moves to better support marketers with engagement on the site. Its latest live streaming feature, LinkedIn LiveOpens a new window , still in beta, is meant to enable brands on the network to create more video content, which has proven to be the form of media users on the network consume and engage with most.

These types of new services highlight a key side of this engagement-driven approach to social media marketing: content creation.

As brands push to produce the kind of content that attracts audiences — posts, memes, videos or thought leadership articles — social media companies are putting time and money into developing features, products and services that can help achieve that goal.

The other side of the equation is focused on enhancing campaign engagement. In other words, once a campaign is live how can we measure its performance and, more importantly, improve it?

This aspect has become first and foremost a question of leveraging data, which is increasingly easy to do with the tools and tech on the market from the social media companies themselves, as well as from marketing technology firms. These products and services are designed to pull actionable insights from consumer data that will help marketers manage and improve engagement on their campaigns.

LinkedIn, for instance, recently debuted a new Audience Engagement categoryOpens a new window . The tool is part of the firm’s marketing partner program and, according to LinkedIn Senior Product Manager Amit Paul, can be used to “better refine content strategy and make smarter decisions to deliver better ROI for LinkedIn ad campaigns and organic posts.”

That’s a pretty hefty claim — better ROI through higher levels of engagement.

Meanwhile, marketing software company Cheetah Digital just unveiled its Customer Engagement Suite,Opens a new window an integration of various existing products. The company claims that the suite of tools enable “marketers to deliver personalized experiences, cross-channel messaging, and loyalty strategies,” promising that its solution “helps marketers to drive revenue, build lasting customer relationships, and deliver a unique value exchange throughout the entire customer lifecycle.”

To me, the guarantee of “throughout the entire customer lifecycle” is especially important because it’s indicative of how we can expect this engagement trend in social media to develop.

With most marketers zeroing in on engagement as a core KPI, competition for audience clicks, reposts, likes and comments is intensifying. No longer is it a question of simply creating more engaging content because that’s what everybody else is doing as well.

Rather, what we are seeing is that marketers need to think about the user experience correlated to engagement across the entire customer lifecycle. We want people engaging from the moment they first see a campaign until they’re convinced to buy a product or service.

Keeping them engaged, ultimately, is keeping them interested.

In many ways, it’s reminiscent of 20th century marketing (think HBO’s Mad Men), where companies needed to grab attention with their ads. In that same way, social media marketers need to capture audience focus, but they then need to convince consumers to go one step further and engage — whether to message your company directly on social media, engage with a specific campaign or follow one of your calls-to-action.

Just look at the new function Facebook has installedOpens a new window for advertisers on the Stories ads in Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

This latest engagement mechanism offers a direct line from brand to consumer. As Ginny Marvin writes in Marketing Land, all users have to do is “swipe up on Stories ads that have the new ‘Send Message’ call to action to start a conversation with the business in Messenger without leaving the app they’re in.”

While the new tool isn’t revolutionary, it showcases this growing emphasis on making the user experience connect to engagement as seamlessly and easily as possible.

With the lines increasingly blurring between marketing and sales, marketers aren’t just getting leads anymore. They need to guide potential buyers through the sales funnelOpens a new window , and getting them to engage throughout that lifecycle will make them all the more likely to spend at the end.