Brands have two primary objectives. The first one is to strengthen their customers' trust, relationship, commitment, and loyalty. And the second is to leverage opportunities for businesses. All of which are achievable through engagement.
Engagement, by marketing definition, simply means encouraging target audience to do something as a response to your social feeds such as like, share, comment, click to open the picture, click the link, etc. It's not just a one-sided interaction with, but rather a line of open communication over a period.
Numerous factors contribute to the level or volume of engagement your brand is receiving especially on social channels. Most of them are driven by principles of psychology to increase engagements between users who follow brands.
What Psychology Has to SayThe brainchild of brand building is human psychology. It has established itself as an invaluable factor in marketing where the margin of action and expenditure of awareness interchanges themselves into significant changes on the bottom line of a campaign. And getting a message across that can spark right emotions, sentiments and psychological responses are the best avenues to reach other people.
The only downside here is that you can't please everyone all the time. Humans, by nature, fall into the different type of personality boxes. Hence, it can be tricky for brand messaging as the audience will likely bound to all kinds of personality. It's the area where social and digital have an advantage across traditional media - they allow you to engage.
To generate this psychological influence that can evoke consumer decision-making in favor of a brand, follow the principles below.
Understand Your Audience
Before starting any branding campaign, always remember that regardless of how diverse your audience is, either by age or location, every interaction boils down to two things: needs and wants. Needs are the basic things you certainly need to live and survive. On the flip side, wants are the things you don't need as necessities but make you feel good about your life.
It's the second emotion that you should aim, for no one needs to follow a particular brand page, people just do so because they wThe brainchild of brand building is human psychology. It has established itself as an invaluable factor in marketing where the margin of action and expenditure of awareness interchanges themselves into significant changes on the bottom line of a campaign. And getting a message across that can spark right emotions, sentiments and psychological responses are the best avenues to reach other people.
The only downside here is that you can't please everyone all the time. Humans, by nature, fall into the different type of personality boxes. Hence, it can be tricky for brand messaging as the audience will likely bound to all kinds of personality. It's the area where social and digital have an advantage across traditional media - they allow you to engage.
To generate this psychological influence that can evoke consumer decision-making in favor of a brand, follow the principles below.
ant to. For such case, brand pages must offer contents that are insightful, entertaining, funny, amazing, nostalgic, shocking, or informative to the audience.
While it's normal to think of ourselves as logical people, the truth is that we're more responsive to things that evoke an emotional response. You need to acknowledge this fact if you want to understand your audience. And while you can promote yourself and post company announcements, you need to remember that it's always a two-way street and that your audience must benefit something out of it.
Give Your Audience a Reason to Act
In a marketing perspective, it can be hard to look for a cause that falls perfectly in the middle of being cynical and inspiring. But it's possible for as long as you don't resort to competitions on "like and share" concept, which is against the terms and conditions of Facebook and other social channels.
Take your cue from Two Girls And A Puppy, a popular Facebook page that went viral. For those who don't know about the page, it's about two daughters who made a bet with their father that if they get one million likes, he'll give them a puppy. Much to their father's surprise, the page's profile photo got two million likes.
In the example, the engagement started with bets and helped the underdogs achieve what they want. The only downside of this approach is that likes, shares or retweets don't always translate into long term engagement. A single hit will make people aware of your page and get you coverage, but you have to give them a feasible reason to follow you.
Build a Sense of Familiarity
A person will more likely endorse or recommend a brand if he or she knows it, that much is obvious. Thus, you will need to capitalize more social media pages if you want to boost that sense of familiarity. The hard part though is building it up.
With thousands of social pages in different channels, competition is now becoming stiffer and more difficult. For one, it will mean regular content posting because the more posts you have, the more chances you'll get to appear in the news feeds of your audience. This action, in return, builds up more sense of familiarity.
Apart from being an excellent platform to draw attention, social media allows you to take a more proactive approach. You just need to look beyond the attention you get and focus more on the conversation happening around you. Through the combination of search and your company news feed, you'll know when people have problems or queries that need answers.
No one expects a company to help, but when they do out of genuine intention, the return is very rewarding. It can be more than the engagement that you hope.
Stimulate Creative Emotions
Brands love to be loved. But most of the time, they fail to inject love or any emotion to their campaigns. It's no longer sufficient that your brand's social page 'looks good,' although it's the obvious starting point, you need to evoke more emotions from your audience.
According to James-Lange theory, emotion comes from physical stimuli (I am laughing, I must be happy), rather than a physical stimulus that comes from emotion (I am happy, that's why I'm laughing). Although it's not fully accepted yet, both approaches have an intrinsic relation.
It may seem like a world away from brand message and engagement, but when tied with memory, you may consider the following:
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The message's creative part persuades a reaction or builds on memory to prompt response.
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Responses create an emotion, either combined or designed with the cognitive dissonance approach in making the audience more responsive.
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The message aligns the brand against the desired emotion in a continuous manner.
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The brand, the audience, and the emotion start to align together.
Brand messages should start engaging beyond utilities and flat visual strategies. It could be an area where they need to stimulate the audience's cognitive processes and other senses.
Take your cue from the videos that move from neutral backgrounds to people or objects screaming and jumping out of the screen. Create something shocking. You need to work in this manner. Look for a destination where you can take your audience after shocking them. Think about what emotions you want them to feel on a long-term basis.
Reflect and Project
According to Charles Horton Cooley 's 'looking glass self' concept, we create pictures of ourselves through our perceptions and interactions with others. Now that we're living in a digital age, our interactions on social media platforms are increasing.
This self-projection in social channels includes an inspirational self that people wish to become themselves. As you seek for greater brand engagement through brand advocates in social media, you can use your brand's message to let potential advocates wrap themselves with the brand's reflected value.
Hence, Cooley's concept into social media self-expression involves the following:
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We visualize how appearance will project to others with the brand.
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We envision the appearance's judgment strengthened by the brand.
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We change ourselves according to other people's judgments raised by the brand.
Therefore, a brand message should reflect and align with the audience, to make them build their image of self-worth and find value out of this alignment. It is a perfect example of Maslow 's final row hierarchy of needs that states:
The growth of self, both self-actualization and esteem must be possible to the message. To make it happen, you need to take into consideration that digital messaging isn't just a single transaction, but rather an engagement with your audience.
Power of Imagery
There is nothing more powerful at delivering a message than using a good image. Images have a greater comment and reply rating and are 43% more efficient compared to other mediums.
A video demands your time if you want to entirely watch its content, while the wall of text requires you to read through it all. In images, what you see is what you get, and you don't have either of those problems that videos or texts have.
Image related posts perform better than other mediums when it comes to shares and likes. So, if it ties with an article or a blog post, always include the link to the conclusion on the summary part so that people can find out more about the subject.
Takeaway
For a long time, digital marketers use innumerable ways to deliver their message to their audiences. Some messages get immediate actions and recognitions while some fail to deliver results and end up in the trash. The lack of context about using the right message, understanding the perceptions and behaviors of consumers toward the brand make it impossible to convey a message to the audiences that will lead to engagements.
It's about time that brands stop yelling at customers about their products and services. Instead, create well-crafted campaigns with relevant messages that audience can relate. Hence, go back to your roots, not as a marketer or a business owner, but as a regular person who knows how it feels to be in the consumer's shoes.
