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Marketing has become a billion-dollar business across the United States. Statistics show that companies spent more than $250 billion on marketing services in 2021 and nearly the same amount on media advertising.
Does that mean that brands need a substantial marketing budget to stand out from their competition? Not necessarily. By using interactive content, businesses of any size can increase campaign participation, customer engagement, and loyalty. Neither requires extensive budgetary commitments.
Why engagement matters
Thousands of brand messages are presented to American consumers every day, but only a few capture their attention and establish a connection. Creating this connection is the key to standing out from the competition and generating sales, revenue, and growth.
To connect with a brand, customers need to engage with it. Driving engagement has become so important in sales and marketing that ‘engagement marketing’ has become a subdiscipline of marketing as a whole.
Engagement marketing aims to trigger an interaction between a customer and a brand. A simple way to think of these interactions is to imagine a conversation between the customer and the brand they are interested in. In the context of digital marketing, that conversation could be initiated by clicking a link, reacting to a post, commenting, or sharing content.
To understand the impact of engagement, it helps to compare the level of involvement on the consumer’s side to the limited engagement generated by traditional forms of marketing. Take traditional TV advertising, for example. A consumer may have watched and loved a commercial, but there are few options to engage with the brand. The viewer may decide to purchase the product instantly or visit a website shown in that commercial, but there is no direct opportunity to engage with the brand and build a bond before purchasing.
The same lack of…
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