There are real—and substantial—financial benefits that can come from moving to engagement-focused marketing. Let’s go through them.

2. Words like “brand advocate” and “engagement” can
sound squishy and could lead you to believe any
potential gains from this new way of marketing will be
intangible.
That is not the case.
There are real—and substantial—financial benefits that
can come from moving to engagement-focused
marketing. Let’s go through them.

4. People have a reason to do business with you. More
importantly, they want to do business with you (and
they will want their friends to do business with you as
well) because you are engaging with them (not
marketing to them).

6. If people are spending money with you, they are not spending
that same money with the people you are competing against.
That increases your edge over the competition.

8. Acquiring customers is always expensive. If you take
care of your existing customers—and you do that in
large part by forging the bonds with them through
the engagement process we’re talking about—they
have fewer reasons to leave.

10. If you do a good job taking care of the people that do
business with you, if the emotional bond is firmly in
place, it is going to be difficult for your competition to
lure them away.

12. This is simply the flip side of the last point. Marketing
101 states that it’s easier to sell additional products and
services to people with whom you already have a good
relationship, one based on shared values. That hasn’t
changed and won’t in the Engagement Economy.

14. If you make your customers happy, they will be willing
to pay more for what you offer. You can’t gouge them,
of course. But they will be a bit less price sensitive. Most
people believe, as I do, that you get what you pay for.

16. Engagement is the fuel to create the virtuous customer cycle:
Your new customers become life-long customers, who turn into
brand advocates, who in turn influence new users to buy your
products and services. Those people become new customers,
who then become life-long customers, and so on.
On point seven, here is a related questions:
Do you know how many engaged brand advocates you have,
who they are, where they are, and what drives them?
If you don’t, you must find out. Today.

17. As you can see from this list, marketing based on
engagement allows you to stop wasting money on stuff
that does not work. But, that is only half the problem.

18. Let’s take an example everyone understands: grocery stores.
Some 60% of a store chain’s marketing budget is spent on two
things: 1) Coupons in newspapers and, 2) creating their own weekly
circular which they print and send to every mailbox in town. (That
circular is, of course, just another form of couponing.)
So, you have to ask yourself, “What’s the ROI on that spend?” Well,
the real ROI is next to nothing because every single grocery store
will honor every other grocery store’s coupons.
That means that 60% of their marketing budget is wasted.

19. The other half of the problem is that marketing to people
the wrong way will actually disengage a buyer. It’s not that
you won’t reach them, it’s that you will reach them in a
way that ensures they will never do business with you.
And the reality is many marketers don’t think about that.

20. Here’s an example: A tech company sent out a digital ad (with fine copy & good
targeting) for a fine product, one that many companies needed, to 350,000
prospective customers.
After seeing the ad, lots of people either inquired about the product or placed an
order. But, and this is a huge but, the company forgot to put an “unsubscribe” link
at the bottom of the ad. There was massive backlash—people were infuriated they
couldn’t opt out, and they complained, loudly.
Despite all the money spent on the campaign and all impressions the CMO could
point to, his efforts had a net negative effect on the organization’s brand.

21. Our choice is binary. We engage our customers early,
everywhere, in meaningful and life-long personal
journeys. Or we risk being sentenced to irrelevance.