Brand Engagement: Inviting Conversations and Measuring the Results.

According to a recent report by global consulting giant McKinsey & Company the efficacy of the estimated $1 trillion in global marketing expenditures is under deep scrutiny by business heads and marketers alike.

A popular view of marketing expenditures from the C Suite.

In a survey of CEOs three out of four agreed with the following statement: Marketers “are always asking for more money, but can rarely explain how much incremental business this money will generate.” Chief marketing officers (CMOs) agree. In another recent survey, just over one-third said they had quantitatively proved the impact of their marketing outlays.

The good news is that technology and social media can effectively invite a conversation with consumers by encouraging (and measuring) engagement, through offering audiences a meaningful value exchange.

Content Marketing: Invite a Conversation

Consider the rise of “content marketing” which is really old fashioned brand story-telling with a new name. The Content Marketing Institute defines it as “A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Michael Brenner was formerly a VP / Marketing at German multinational software giant SAP. In 2014 he literally bet his career on content marketing by taking the position of Head of Strategy at content marketing SaaS start-up NewsCred.

Brenner defines content marketing as simply being at the intersection of what brands publish and what consumers want. He observed that consumers see over 5,000 marketing messages a day, and manage to ignore nearly all of them.

Michael Brenner

“In today’s always on, hyper-connected world, the only option for brands to connect with an audience is to create, publish and share stories people love,” Brenner wrote last summer, he recently observed he was hoping for a more rapid transition from traditional to content marketing.

He views his current job at NewsCred as “one part education and two parts strategy” by sharing best practices and showing clients how content marketing can connect and resonate with consumers.

Brenner still sees 90% of corporate marketing budgets going to traditionally based brand and product messages. But he thinks a much larger portion of the “ineffective digital display ad-spend” will go over to content marketing in the next 2-3 years.

“NewsCred software helps corporate marketers focus more on improving the customer experience.” He went on, “we’re working with digital marketers, ad agencies, PR and social media teams, as well as those people who manage the customer touch-points to find value in content marketing, by aligning it with their business objectives.”

While creating compelling content is a tall order for many marketers, effectively measuring consumer engagement with content can be equally challenging. A great place where marketers can measure engagement is in social media, the venue for virtual word-of-mouth marketing, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

A leader in monitoring and helping manage social media is NYC-based CommandPost is a venture-funded start-up founded by Tom Chernaik that was just named a 2015 
Cool Vendor in Social Marketing by Gartner. The subscription data analytic / social intelligence  platform offers proprietary social media monitoring software that rolls up engagement data and identifies engaged social audiences, both on a corporate and brand-specific level for client brands and their competitors.

Tom Chernaik

Chernaik points out that not all types of social media engagement are created equally. “For example Twitter can be the most active channel for publishing content, but often provides only a small part of overall consumer engagement when compared to other channels. The data is easy to get publicly, but is only showing part of the story” he observed.

CommandPost generates real-time, actionable insights into the people (who), the content (what) and the social media platforms (where) that drive a brand / company’s social value.

By understanding what works, and what doesn’t when it comes to content and its ability to effectively and efficiently engage consumers, marketers can better manage content subject matter, authors, editorial tonality and publishing frequency in order to optimize their content marketing efforts.

The CommandPost platform also allows brands to track and benchmark competitive social media activity, and “drill-down” to look at, segment and manage individual advocate / influencer initiatives. These opinion leaders are the most active (and valuable) people in your social media audience and the hardest to find and organize. 


Using CommandPost, you can better understand "the most engaged audience members that really matter along with the context of what gets them to engage with the brand" according to Chernaik. 

CommandPost can also automate the process of “tagging” and grouping specific posts / content in order to track engagement effectiveness and actual audiences on a very granular level, and in turn determine if the content is resonating with desired audience and estimate “earned media value.”

And recently Linked In – the social platform with 350 million users where people network for business deals, new jobs and news – announced its move into social media management with the launch of its Elevate app, that will help employees share company content.

LinkedIn Elevate: Harnessing the Power of Employees.

Elevate is a new paid mobile and desktop app that suggests articles to users – based on algorithms from Linked In’s news recommendation service Pulse and Newsle, as well as “human curation.”

Elevate will let its users schedule and share those links across Linked In and Twitter.  It will also reportedly help companies empower their employees to share content. TechCruch characterized the new service as “a very pared-down, LinkedIn-focused Hootsuite.

For marketing professionals, it will them keep the social media wheels turning, with story suggestions and being able to staying active even when they have no links of their own to share, and the data analytics to track how well things are performing.

All of this points to a new world order for marketing, one that balances the art of compelling story telling with the science of data analytics. Savvy marketers are now increasingly able to harness and optimize the power of consumer engagement using social media. This will in turn likely return marketing to being a cost-efficient and more effective enterprise-level growth driver for companies.