There is good news for brand managers out there. There are some excellent ways to engage with consumers on-line and measure the impact. But guess what? It’s not through on-line display advertising. First of all, the CTR’s are way too low to have a serious uplift in brand metrics. Secondly, what is a click really worth to a brand? Not much, as recent research by Comscore pointed out there is no correlation at all between clicks and brand equity. Pre-rolls, mid-rolls, etc. are not the way to the promised land either. Anything that interrupts the consumer and is not initiated by the consumer has been shown to have little to no value to the advertiser. After all, what is branding all about - building relationships over time resulting in increased sales, etc. right? Do you have a lot of friends who constantly interrupt you? Well, if a brand wants friends, the same holds true - stop interrupting.
So, how do brand managers engage with consumers? Well, savvy brand managers implement campaigns where engagement must be initiated by the consumer, not the other way around. For example, if you provide video content on your site, you can certainly measure the amount of “engagement time” people are choosing to spend with the content. You can measure each view, how much time they spent with the content, etc. Consumer initiated engagement is really the only engagement metric worth measuring and placing serious value on. That’s exactly why search marketing is effective - because it’s user initiated. There are many ways to drive engagement…first, have great content on your site worth engaging in. Second, allows consumers go participate in the content creation through UGC, mashups, rating, voting, sharing, etc. Third, instead of the focus being on pushing the brand one can create “brand pull” by providing a “community” where the brand is not in the starring role, but still crucial to the story . For a good example of brand building look no further than Barack Obama’s website. I don’t know if Barack will ultimately become the next President but I do know he and his people know how to leverage the web to build his brand equity.
