Engage your customers: effective marketing communications

For many years the key role of marketing communications has focussed primarily on promoting an organisation's products and services. But times have changed and the marketing focus has shifted. Chris Fill, the Senior Examiner at the Chartered Institute of Marketing reports.

Now, marketing communications can be used to help shape the relationships that organisations form with various stakeholders, especially their customers. This article looks at some issues to consider when trying to develop appropriate levels of engagement customers.

Effective marketing communications should be an audience-centred activity, one that enables organisations to achieve one of two main tasks. The first is to create and sustain brands by enabling audiences to make associations with products, services and organisations that are of particular value to them. The second is to motivate audiences to behave in particular ways, often referred to as a 'call-to-action'.

As a broad generalisation, the trend in many sectors has been to move marketing communication investments away from brand building to driving customer behaviour. This can be seen in the increasing number of campaigns which feature direct marketing, sales promotion, field marketing, web activity and interactive sites or activities which highlight customer experience and involvement. What is common to all of these is the increasing use of marketing communications that attempts to involve audiences and to encourage their participation in the communication process. This focus on what audiences do with the marketing communications they receive is a reflection of the drive by organisations to engage their audiences.

What is 'engagement'

So what is engagement and what do organisations need to do in order to achieve engagement? Well, engagement is partly about connecting organisations with their audiences, but we know too that connection alone is insufficient. It is the participation of audiences in the communication process that really counts.

Engagement is about three things:

• First, marketing communications should be used to get the audience's attention.
• Second, it should generate knowledge and understanding.
• Third, it should enable two-way communication such that the messages are meaningful to all those involved in the communication process.

So, a key question is how should organisations develop attention, knowledge and meaning? Well, we know that within the communication process audiences attend to two main variables: the informational (intellectual) content and the feelings (emotions) associated with the messages we receive. These two things hold the key to engagement. Marketing communications should seek to deliver messages that have an audience-specific balance of intellectual and emotional content. Some might say that this is not new and that would be true.

But now it is about how audiences receive, perceive and use these two content elements that is important for engagement.

There's more than one way to sell toothpaste

Let's look at some examples. Some customer segments use toothpaste for the health and hygiene attributes. Brand X could communicate these benefits by stressing particular product attributes.

This can be achieved in various ways; by highlighting the health related benefits, using a serious tone of voice, using spokespersons dressed in white medical coats, using medical names or by depicting the problems that arise by not looking after oral hygiene. These and other approaches might satisfy the dominant intellectual requirement of this particular type of audience.

In another segment, bright white gleaming teeth are key to toothpaste purchase. Here the emotional aspect should be stressed when communicating brand Y, in this case the importance of dental hygiene in social situations. This could be achieved by showing how users gain increased social acceptance, by depicting celebrities who use the brand or by suggesting that career success or increased personal confidence accrues to those that have white bright (and of course always smiling) teeth.

In some business sectors, engineers or scientists can have a significant influence on certain purchase decisions. The training, education and background of these types of people suggest that they prefer to receive rational information that is supported with logic and reasoning, in other words, an intellectual approach. Other business people may be more interested in maintaining a valuable relationship with a supplier or customer, in which case the emotional content may be more significant. In both of these cases the marketing communications messages should be used to engage the audience by reflecting the receivers' preferred information processing styles.

Choose the right media

Media selection has a crucial role to play in the engagement process. As a generalisation, much of the traditional graphic design media (such as press advertising) delivers good emotional content and the web and digital applications engage well where the intellectual needs are high.

We should also consider the increasing fragmentation of both audiences and the media. For example, there used to be three TV channels, and now there are hundreds. So extra effort is required to capture and retain audience interest and attention, and understanding which media each target audience favours is essential.

The use of relationship marketing

In recent years we have seen the development and increasing importance of relationship marketing. This approach is centred on the premise that it is more profitable to satisfy and retain current customers rather than searching for new customers to replace those that have gone away.

Relationship marketing can be very effective, but we should remember that not all customers want a full 'relationship' with the organisation or brands that they buy. The type and level of engagement needs to match the customers' wishes. For example, if customers choose to buy on price then marketing communications to this audience should be designed to engage them through price. Other audience segments might be more interested in speed, quality or other criteria, so the communication messages should be changed accordingly.

Engagement as a marketing objective

By engaging customers and entering into meaningful conversations with them, it is more likely that more of them will remain customers. The more frequently engagement occurs - as long as its frequency isn't seen as an intrusion by customers - the more likely that stronger relationships will develop.

Read on . . .

If you want to engage further with marketing communications you may wish to read Chris Fill's best selling book 'Marketing Communications: Engagement, Strategies and Practice' which is now available in its fourth edition.

He has also recently published 'Business to Business Marketing' written with Karen Fill. Both books are published by Pearson Education and are available through leading high street and online bookstores.

© Titman Firth 2005