Getting Engaged With Customers

USA Today looks at a new trend in the marketing sector: engagement. Brands are trying to get consumers to spend time with their brands especially online:

Much of the ad industry has been converted to the belief that engagement — adspeak for getting consumers to spend time with brand messages — is what gets results from advertising. One way to do that is to send the consumer — often with a traditional TV ad — to a website to interact with or sometimes create the ad. Such interaction can extend a consumer’s time spent with a brand to minutes or longer vs. 30 seconds for TV ads.

Making Web advertising work, however, is not that easy. Among challenges:

• Attracting not just attention but attention from the consumer you want.

• Creating measurement tools that demonstrate to a client that time spent online means money spent on products.

• Trying to make sure that encouraging Web visitors to create and pass along ads — known as “user-generated content” — does not result in unwelcome surprises. A website promoting Chevrolet’s new Tahoe SUV recently led to user-created “ads” passed around on the Web that ridiculed its gas use.

The article also has a number of tips to engage customers:

•The big idea.
•Pass it along.
•Sell, sell, sell.
•Mix old and new.
•Make them stay.
•All of the above.

USATODAY.com – Marketers aim for ‘engaged’ consumers