34 Marketing Your Venture: Engagement and Analytics
34 Marketing Your Venture: Engagement and Analytics
Jessica Pucci
Far too often, entrepreneurs focus squarely on conversion and forget about the rest of the funnel.[1] It can sound tempting to measure the success of your business solely by tickets sold, apps downloaded or T-shirts shipped. But evaluating a venture that way neglects the value and impact of your audience—the audience you have now, and the audiences you want but don’t have yet. Is your company really successful if it sells 750 hats at a music festival? To really say one way or the other, you’d need to know what your audience opportunity was first: Did 1,000 people attend the festival (if so, you sold hats to 75% of them, and that’s excellent!), or did 50,000 people attend (if so, you sold hats to only 1.5% of them, and that’s not so excellent, assuming everyone at the festival had a head)? And what about the 200 festival-goers who came to browse your hat booth but didn’t buy anything… yet? What about the 450 attendees who saw your hats around the festival and started following your brand on Instagram? Shouldn’t we include them when we tally up our successes? Don’t they count for something?
Your job as an entrepreneur is not just to make a single sale: It’s to build relationships with audiences who will grow your company. Focusing on a one-time sale will get you just that: one sale. But focusing on audience development—strategic growth and engagement of likely, long-term customers—creates a sustainable business.
Growth and engagement go hand-in-hand. Tomatoes don’t just grow: They need a particular patch of dirt with at least six hours of sun; they need a trellis; they need regular water, pruning and support—and that’s just tomatoes. Other veggies need different care. The point is, you don’t toss down some seeds and expect a harvest. Growth takes research, planning, hands-on care, and recognition that no two crops need the same thing. Gardening isn’t so far from digital audience growth. Just like produce, digital audiences are all different, and all require different forms of nurturing and nourishment to thrive. The way we feed and care for our digital audiences is engagement.
Engagement
Broadly, entrepreneurs and marketers use the term “engagement” to capture the many ways people and organizations identify, listen to, interact with, and activate digital audiences. When a company states it wants to “ramp up engagement,” it usually wants to increase discussion and activity around its brand, content or product. When a company hires an “engagement manager,” it usually intends for that person to manage the connections to and conversations with its audiences, on digital platforms or otherwise.
More specifically, however, engagement is defined as any action taken on digital content. A tweet, for example, is a piece of digital content; engagements with tweets include likes, retweets, and replies. A page on a website is a piece of digital content; engagements on web pages include scrolls, cl