The 5 principles of engagement marketing: engage people as individuals

Marketing is the wings of business. It takes a product or service, delivering it to the consumer to offer a choice of whether to buy it or not. Effective marketing will compel an empowered consumer to take you up on an offer. In the Age of Information, marketing cannot afford to continue on as it did before. It must adapt. Innovative marketers around the globe are, and have been, busy learning to market in the Digital Age. One of these innovators is Marketo, an organization whose mission is “helping marketers master the art and science of digital marketing.” In the following five days, Business Review USA, will discuss the “5 Principles of Engagement Marketing,” according to Marketo’s e-book.

Marketo’s marketing approach is based on the idea that buyers are forming opinions and drawing conclusions before they interact with a company. Decision making is no longer confined to the showroom floor or company website. Therefore, it’s up to the marketer to become the steward of the customer journey and build a bond with customers wherever they are.

According to Marketo, “engagement marketing is about creating meaningful interactions with people, based on who they are and what they do, continuously over time. It’s marketing that engages people towards a goal, wherever they are, and it’s marketing that is backed by both creative vision and hard data. Finally, it’s marketing that allows you to move quickly, shortening the time between idea and outcome, so that you can create more—and better targeted—programs.”

Principle 1: Engage people as individuals

Whether you’re talking to a CEO about hardware or a new mom about car seats, you need to be well versed on the buyer’s individual preferences, history, relationship to your company, stage in the buying journey and more.

In the case of a marketer for a large stadium that hosts football games, she wants to turn the individual ticket holder into a season ticket-holder and the latter into a lifetime ticket holder. “The marketer could us an ‘engagement marketing platform’ to learn all about their customers: which game tickets individuals have purchased, which teams individuals “like” or follow on social media, each fan’s favorite players—all of that information could become the fodder for marketing that speaks directly to individual customers” reads Marketo’s e-book.  

“Next, the marketer could even identify specific indicators that a fan is likely to purchase season tickets and then nudge that person closer to a sale—maybe an email with a special discount code? The more you know about your audience, the more likely you are to make the best offer at the right time,” concludes Marketo’s primer.

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