App Marketers: Let’s Talk About The Word Engagement

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Be confident in your product and the conversation should be easy.

Go to a digital marketing seminar. Or a webinar. Or read a white paper, ebook, content marketing blog or analyst report. In any format you will encounter any variety of blowhards trying to appear intelligent, spitting jargon like they invented it.

It depends on the arrogance of the pundit, but sometimes they did.

All of these experts will throw out one word, over and over, like they have a crate full of life jackets on the Titantic:

Engage.

You must engage your customers. Engage your audience. Your users, your readers, viewers, clients, coworkers, family and puppies. Be engaged. Be awesome.

Here’s a question: what the hell does engage mean anyway?

Engagement has become one of those marketing buzzwords that has devolved into the realm of meaningless jargon. You know, like “content,” “inbound” or “micro moments.”

Let’s try it in a sentence:

“Engage your audience by creating delightful mobile micro moments throughcontent to deliver inbound leads.”

Somebody at HubSpot just swooned.

Define: Engagement Marketing

To be clear, engagement is not necessarily a bad thing. ARC encourages its journalists to talk to readers in the comments section of its articles, on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, via email and so forth. In a media world where publications are eliminating commenting systems, we will keep ours to address readers in conversation. We like to show that we are humans and we care and appreciate what our readers think of the styling of the magazine.

We are real people. Our readers are (mostly, I think) real people. We talk to people because we genuinely care what they think. If you want to call it that, I suppose we do … engage … with our readers.

See also: PSA To App Publishers: Don’t Break Push

I don’t think I have ever turned to ARC’s top lieutenant Dave Bolton and said, “make sure you engage with our readers.” I more likely said, “make sure to respond to reader comments.” The mandate is to be personable and conversational … confrontational if necessary.

Marketing automation engine Marketo* stated in 2014 that we are now in the era of engagement marketing. In a blog post, Marketo defined the seven principles of engagement marketing (see right). The principles are pretty straightforward: talk to people wherever they are basically all the time to get them to achieve a measurable goal for the company.

Is it just me or does engagement marketing look a whole lot like stalking?

*ARC’s parent company Applause is a customer of Marketo and ARC’s email newsletter system will soon be run by Marketo.

Data, persona modeling and predictive analytics make it a whole lot easier to “engage” with people in 2016. Especially in the world of mobile apps, where data is abundant and communication between publishers and users is nearly seamless.

Eliminating Jargon To Get To The Core Of Engagement

In our long conversation with Localytics chief marketing officer Josh Todd about the current state of app marketing, we asked him to define the notion of engagement … without using the word engagement.

Todd gave it his best shot:

The core question comes in that it has to be defined on an individual basis. What is the purpose of your app? What is the value that you add to somebody’s life? And then thinking about how you bring that to life through everything that you do.

If you are talking about the buzzword engagement, that might be as simple as how many times is somebody coming into my app? How long are they spending? Those are going to be superficial metrics until you know your core.

Let’s look at Uber. They don’t want you to spend a ton of time in their app. For them, they want you to be able to open up your phone (or maybe get to a point where you don’t have to) and a car is there right as you need it and you are on your way.

For them, engagement is that broader experience that you are delivering to help make your life easier and better. If you look at somebody like some of these fitness apps and trackers, what is their core purpose? Hopefully their core purpose, at some level, is to create a healthier world. I would hope. Each probably has some version of a mission statement that aligns around that.

I think they need to look at what engagement means to them on an individual basis to the value they are bringing to society and ultimately to their app users.

Todd’s advice seems counterintuitive: focus on your own product, your own persona and experience and learn what makes you great. Why did the person download the app in the first place?

And therein is the point: engagement … or really any type of brand-to-consumer interaction … should be easy if a company is confident in its product and knows that it has real value to people. Engagement does not need to be some forced and contrived policy, but natural communication of benefits and value between two interested parties.

“There is less mystery in apps,” Todd said. “It is the core marketing principles that are going to make you great. How well do you know your users and how well you can tailor things.”