Step Up Your Customer Engagement

Here's an interesting way to think about the relationship between the broad types of media you can invest in and the level of customer engagement that each inspires. Take a look at the chart below, and then the description of each of the broad media types depicted in the chart.

3 Ways to Engage Your Customers

• Paid Media: This is what you would expect — purchasing media space from a media producer and running your own advertisement. These days, this is considered "old school." But trust me, this type of media can still be very effective depending on your goals. Your ad may run in print, online, or broadcast, but in the end, it's an ad you created and "pushed" out into the market via available media channels. If you have either lots of people to reach, or a very homogeneous group to reach with a single message and you want to repeat it again and again, this is a good channel.

• Owned Media: Now this is both an old- and a new-media concept, and it covers quite a few things. This is media that you create and own yourself, and then distribute in a variety of ways. "Back in the day," as my mother would say, you had the Hallmark Holiday Special on television brought to you by Hallmark Cards. Of course, every single ad that ran during that special was, lo and behold, an ad for Hallmark Cards. Hallmark created its own media and ran all of its advertising on something they had invested in creating. The updated version of owned media is most commonly found on the web. A blog is owned media. So is a content-rich website that is providing added value to its customers. Check outwww.poptarts.com if you want to see a good example of today's owned media. This site talks to Moms, kids, and teens; and the site hosts, believe it or not, Pop-Tarts World™! This is an expensive media channel, but you have total and complete control, and you can add real value for your customers.

• Earned Media: And now we move into the best possible space in which you can play to help you build quality relationships and boost engagement with your best customers. Earned media, by definition, requires that you "earn" the customer relationship. The one and only way you can do that is by providing marketing, content, or other forms of communication that are so high in value that a trusted relationship — and brand or business affinity — evolves that stands the test of time. This is where social media, managed well, comes in. Or a really good, repetitive guerilla marketing approach like a kiosk in a great location where you can interact with customers on a daily basis. There are lots of ways to used earned media, and the beauty of it is, it's often less expensive from a cash point of view but does take more time to strategize and execute effectively.

I love to discover and share new ways to consider the multitude of means you have at your disposal to reach and influence your customers. Once again, all three of these channels can work for you, you just need to understand the value, cost, and relative effectiveness of each against your overall marketing strategy.