Do you generate engagement, but don’t sell? This can be a nightmare for many managers. As much as engagement is essential, that can happen. Fortunately, there are strategies to investigate this situation and try to reverse the scenario and, thus, relate the attraction directly to the profit.
In the digital world, getting customers is also very important for companies, however, it is no longer the main concern. At the very least, the ways to achieve this goal are not the same as traditional marketing , which invested in direct strategies to target consumers.
Currently, it is essential to strengthen the engagement and communication with the public, so that leads to concrete business relationships.
However, an attraction strategy can lead to a damaging scenario, in which you ask yourself: ” Why not sell, even with good communication?” In other words, there is a good brand positioning program, with well-used digital tools, but there is no real impact on sales.
This can happen for a number of reasons that we will investigate in this article. So if you want to learn more about the subject, be sure to read it carefully.
In this article, we will see:
Why is customer engagement important?
What is the relationship of engagement with customer constancy?
What are the main reasons to get engaged if your product doesn’t sell?
How to go beyond engagement and increase customers?
Why is customer engagement important?
First, let’s understand the importance of engagement. In the end, we do not want with this text to conclude that engagement is not necessary. Therefore, we need to deepen the concept.
Currently, it is very common to see engagement as any kind of routine interaction that occurs with company profiles on social media , for example. Many users even think that likes equate to good engagement. However, reducing its concept to this is a problem that leads to misconceptions of its importance.
Engagement not only encompasses reactions on social channels , but also the entire communication strategy of the brand with its consumers and potential clients in order to generate their active participation .
It goes far beyond, therefore, the so-called vanity metrics and tries to understand the quality of likes and comments, seeks to interpret the numbers and contextualize them. In the same way, it goes beyond social networks and encompasses channels such as email .
The main purpose of generating engagement is to strengthen business relationships and go beyond a simple purchase and sale commitment . The company better understands who its customer is and tries to assimilate and understand their problems, needs and ambitions, and then know how to communicate and establish a bond of friendship.
In this context, the connection between the brand and people becomes horizontal, as if they were friends talking and not as someone trying to impose a product or an idea. This is consistent with the modern mindset of marketing and Inbound Marketing and also with the vision of digital transformation .
So, engagement becomes a weapon to position your company correctly in the digital world in which the customer already has a more active posture. The consumer is a person with the power of choice and greater influence, with characteristics that allow them to make a safer and less influential decision.
In this way, the idea of conversing naturally with consumers places the brand in a healthy way in people’s daily lives. As a consequence of all this, we have an active brand, creating stimulating dialogues and bridges with people in a social way.
By creating links more naturally, purchases on the website or in stores also become more organic. That way, it is easier for the consumer to buy something, as the brand gains their trust.
In addition, the customer is led in a more spontaneous way through the sales funnel , without anything that forces him or that forces him to skip stages abruptly.
What is the relationship of engagement with customer constancy?
As a consequence of good engagement, we have one of the most desired objectives by Digital Marketing professionals and managers : loyalty.
That is, generating engagement is not only a key factor for the customer to buy, but it is also essential to guarantee that they always return and, also, that they become an advocate and ambassador of your brand .
Ultimately, if trust has been built, the company can count on the efforts of its own delighted customers to optimize the acquisition of new consumers, in a profitable and profitable cycle .
If the potential buyer noticed value in the relationships with the company – which, as we said, must be present in all moments of interaction, in addition to the purchase – they will want a shortcut the next time they need to buy and they will prefer the option that you already know and are already familiar with.
In addition, it is important to note that engagement plays a very important role in keeping the bond with customers alive. This can be practiced with actions by email, for example, sending promotional offers and specific products for each type of consumer . Thus, it is possible to carry out both upselling and cross selling .
It is like a relationship between friends, in which the parties keep in touch to keep up to date with what is happening in their lives. In this way, they share moments, ambitions and needs.
Similarly, businesses must always keep up-to-date with their buyer, who is a complex human being and constantly changing perspectives and desires.
In this sense, email is used as a channel to reinforce the nutrition of customers with whom there has already been contact. The company continues to knock down new objections and establish a long-lasting and healthy relationship for both of them.
What are the main reasons to get engaged if your product doesn’t sell?
As we have seen so far, engagement is instrumental in reaching more sales and expanding the consumer base. However, there is an alarming problem that occurs when a company has good engagement, but does not sell.
This is how we get to the central aspect that summarizes the problem of this article.
Let’s understand, then, the reasons that lead a company to have an interesting engagement, but without getting customers .
Lack of action in front of the data obtained
If the company obtains some engagement data, such as reactions, shared posts, mentions, responses and feedback , it is a mistake not to draw action plans based on them.
These informational assets should be considered starting points for the conversion and attraction strategies of those clients. In this sense, for example, the organization can respond to these consumers and try to attract them personally.
So, you need to be data-dri v in : analyze data and make practical decisions that orient toward specific actions to address the problems encountered and opportunities. Thus, it is possible to transform engagement into real results .
Lack of information about the latest product or service updates
There are cases in which the customer is not aware of possible updates to the product / service and how the company can solve the new problems that arise. In this type of situation, engagement can be transformed into a set of data that does not generate concrete sales results .
Failure to analyze customer feedback
This error is connected to the first. Many companies do not monitor or measure the feedback they receive from their customers, therefore, they do not know what they think. That is, they fail to understand the sentiment behind the interactions and assume that those interactions are positive, when they are not always so.
The monitoring and analysis of these reactions allows us to understand how the brand can adjust its processes, its behavior and its approaches to better satisfy consumers . By understanding a certain standard in feedbacks, for example, the company better understands how the customer sees it.
Measuring feedbacks can be a challenge, since we are not just talking about controlling the responses of one or another social network. The ideal is to have a complete view of all customer interactions with the company and ensure a unification of the management of these dialogues.
Creation of irrelevant content
In many cases, there is engagement, but the potential client does not go ahead because they do not get value with the company’s content. In other words, there is no consolidated strategy to deal with objections, for example, or a deepening of the issues worked to generate value. In this way, the consumer feels distrustful about making the purchase decision .
Irrelevant content only creates an impression that the company does not have the expertise to deal with customer issues. In many cases, your problems are very specific, associated with technical points, and require specialized knowledge.
To make the decision to invest, in fact, they must rely on the brand’s knowledge of specific matters. To prove it, it is necessary to reinforce Content Marketing with relevant approaches .
Lack of understanding of customer behavior
When brands have good engagement and a good connection with the customer, but obtain expressive sales results, the perception of behavior can be a problem.
This happens because the consumer is extremely complex, dynamic, and definitely non-linear. To understand all these nuances, the company must make an effort to know its consumers in depth.
Understanding the buying habits of each lead helps a lot. That understanding allows specific actions that lead the person through the sales funnel, moving from engagement to a more serious commitment to the company.
Lack of care with microinteractions
The buying process is the final decision, which comes from many other key moments in the relationship between the brand and the customer. Many of those circumstances are small and specific, like a timely response or a sent email. The so-called micro-interactions are simple and short events that determine whether the customer is going to decide to buy or retain their loyalty .
Even in these micro-interactions, the company can gain trust and establish a connection with its customer. Therefore, it is essential to be attentive to all processes to optimize results and convert engagement into sales.
Lack of customization
The customization is a mandatory aspect in the digital world. If companies communicate with their consumers directly or if they invest in the creation of relevant content to educate their leads, they must take that into consideration.
As a result, some miss out on generating business by not fully customizing their approaches .
In this sense, it is important to have a good and defined brand identity and to know the needs and preferences of the client. Your brand and your client must guide their actions.
Although more general content may appeal to communication channels, the public will feel safe to invest when they feel that there is real and specific value being generated.
That is, only when they notice that it is a personalized offer, that it satisfies their problem and that it comes from who really understands how to fix it . Personalization is what builds trust.
Fragmented experience
We have already talked about how the notion of engagement and the very conception of the user / customer experience is very complex and that they occur in various media , in an unpredictable way. Therefore, another mistake that brands make is to leave the experience fragmented or disconnected in all those channels.
Much of this happens due to lack of data integration and lack of systems such as CRM .
In this way, the client is not properly monitored, since the company does not have an integrated vision of who it is in the various communication channels. Hence the problem of not measuring customer feedback or reactions or responses.
Lack of vision of the sales funnel
Finally, we can mention the problem of not selling due to lack of vision of the sales funnel. In many cases, the high engagement of certain leads does not generate deeper results, as the company fails to position those people in the funnel.
In other words, it is not able to understand if the consumer is close to the purchase or not.
In this way, they can take very incisive and direct actions for people who are not yet ready to buy or in attempts to educate and teach those who are already mature. Smarter management of contacts and interactions can address this error .
How to go beyond engagement and increase customers?
To transform engagement into profit, effectively, it is necessary to attend to some prerogatives. One of them is the definition of a strategy with OKRs and KPIs :
OKRs are measurable objectives that allow the company to know exactly what to achieve and how to do it. Thus, they generate a clear vision of the goals and objectives ;
On the other hand, KPIs allow you to monitor the results and describe what is happening, as well as estimate how far the company is from its objectives.
Another approach is to break down objections and impediments to doing business. In many cases, there is something between the company and its enthusiastic customers. You need to research it, find out why you can’t sell your product or service, and fight the problem.
As we saw, engagement is not always synonymous with sales, sometimes people are excited, but companies are still not selling. It is essential to note that engagement is important, but it must be managed carefully so that it truly becomes a sales strategy.
Did you like the content? Then better understand the engagement metric in our article on Customer Engagement: how to follow this metric to retain your customers for longer.
