Enhancing Customer Engagement in Product Marketing

A significant part of engaging existing customers requires understanding the broader scope of product marketing. In this approach, product, sales, and marketing go hand-in-hand through the customer journey to create a lasting impression. These collectively form the basic principle behind achieving customer engagement in a highly saturated global market.

Defining Customer Engagement in Product Marketing

Customer engagement is about improving a business's ongoing interactions and customer experiences. It is a strategic move (in product marketing) that aims to understand and iteratively improve how customers interact with the brand’s products. The objective is to add value to every specific customer’s unspoken demand via their interactions online or offline, and make them satisfied and loyal post-purchase. 

The process is always ongoing, with cross-teams working together to create value that the customers understand and give back to the company. 

Now, if you want to explore more on this definition, we have compiled a playlist on some of the best talks and explanations of customer engagement in product marketing for you to watch.

 What is the Role of the Existing Customer in Product Marketing?

Anyone who understands the customer-centric side of product management knows that the contemporary target market only cares about personalised interactions and experiences. A business owner has to be careful even more now as their customers have too many options online. 

Even though it markets the most innovative product, it is not a guarantee that earlier customers will return again. When they do not return, it could be a problem that is considered a customer experience gap. 

This kind of gap not only creates a dent in the company’s ROI, but also in the KPIs of the product marketer, which include Customer Churn Rate (CCR) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Among many Forbes Council Members, some have even stated that acquiring a new customer is five to seven times costlier than retaining an existing one. 

The best solution, then is to engage the customer to build long-term loyalty. 

Let’s look at some ways chronologically. 

1. Improve every touchpoint of the customer journey.
2. Understand the unaddressed needs, wants, and demands based on their behaviours.
3. Then bring in technology to implement the feedback on the product.  

These steps broadly cover what Steve Jobs once said: "You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.” 

Before going further on strategies that keep customers engaged, we want to engage you some more on the concept of customer experience.  

What Constitutes an Amazing Customer Experience Today

From the organisation and product marketer’s job description POVs, customer experience is the sum of quantifiable KPIs generated from various forms of their interactions with the business. 

According to PwC, there are five main qualifiable factors for enhancing customer experience. A remarkable customer experience today hinges on factors like speed, convenience, consistency, friendliness, and human touch. These elements collectively shape a positive and memorable impression.

• Speed - Prioritise technology for swift interactions that caters to both employees and customers.
• Convenience - Ensure a seamless transition across smart devices, offering a smooth experience across all demographics.
• Consistency - Eliminate experience gaps to maintain a consistent and reliable customer journey.
• Friendliness - Understand and address the primary demands of customers to foster a friendly and customer-centric approach.
• Human touch - Create genuine connections by humanizing technology and providing employees with tools to enhance customer experiences.

Additional Insights:

The PwC research screenshot in this survey further highlights factors such as charitability, loyalty programs, unique experiences, fun, brand image, and more, all contributing to bridging the experience gap.

Customer Engagement and Customer Experience Difference

Clearly differentiating customer engagement from customer experience is crucial. While engagement involves active participation and relationship-building, experience encompasses overall perception throughout the customer journey.

Aspect	Customer Experience (CX)	Customer Engagement
Definition	Overall perception and sentiment based on cumulative interactions and touchpoints throughout the customer journey.	Ongoing interactions and active participation between a customer and a brand, focusing on building a relationship.
Scope	Encompasses all interactions, direct and indirect, across the entire customer journey.	Focuses on specific interactions initiated by the brand to involve and connect with customers.
Emphasis	Emphasises the quality of interactions and experiences, aiming for customer satisfaction and loyalty.	Emphasises encouraging customer participation, involvement, and building a deeper relationship.
Objective	Aims to create a positive, seamless, and memorable overall impression of the brand.	Aims to build a lasting connection, encourage ongoing interactions, and create brand loyalty.
Focus	Focuses on the customer's perceptions, emotions, and satisfaction derived from interactions.	Focuses on stimulating and maintaining customer interest, involvement, and interaction with the brand.

While you see the differences now, there are also many overlaps to consider. The customer experience is a huge part of past, present, and future customer engagement strategies. 

Do’s and Don’ts of Engaging Customers through Product Marketing Today

Take a good glance at these criteria. We explain them in detail below. 

Do's	Don'ts
Provide constant, valuable experiences	Prioritise company benefits over customer value
Integrate marketing and sales teams for collaboration	Operate marketing and sales teams in isolated silos
Focus on customer-centric engagement	Neglect customer perception of value
Adopt a strategic framework for continuous value creation	Rely solely on company-centric engagement strategies
Emphasize value generation for customers	Neglect collaboration and value exchange with customers
Utilise engagement elements effectively	Overlook elements vital for improving customer-brand relationships

In light of the trends, such as digital-first experiences and the return of offline channels post-pandemic, the demand of the hour is customer engagement that is constantly valuable and wholesome. The target audience interacts or demands quality interactions at all levels of the marketing funnel and all places - be it, in-store or on their preferred social media platforms. 

But the subtextual question that marketing scholars have focused on to answer is 

‘Is this engagement for the benefit of company or providing value to the customer?’

For past businesses with cross-functional teams, it was traditionally a norm to separate the deeds of marketing and sales teams. 

Today, it is simply not possible to simply let the marketing team create a budget and strategy. All the while thinking the sales team will do the magic in a silo. Now this causes splitting the focus into company and customer (Philip Kotler et al., HBR, Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing, 2006). 

This means the company only focuses on customer engagement from its own POV. The customer experience, or the value of the product, takes a back seat.

Even recent academic literature (post-2010) on what engages the customer, point out the split in how companies in the past have perceived that customer engagement benefits the company. 

Customer engagement today needs a more strategic framework where there is constant value generation in engaging the customer. Werner H Kunz et al., in their paper on Customer Engagement in a Big Data World (2017), state that a need to generate value for customers can happen in two ways.

1. Customers themselves must be able to know the value provided to them by the brand through engagement.
2. The company must be able to pass that value back to the customer.

Likewise, T. Ndhlovu & T. Maree in their study on The central role of consumer–brand engagement in product and service brand contexts (2023) in the Journal of Marketing Analytics, quote Hollebeek on the importance of customer interaction. 

Consumer-brand engagement here is related to customer engagement, but the crux of improving relationships in both concepts can or should involve the following. 

• Involvement
• Co-created value
• Interactivity
• Brand experience
• Customer experience
• Commitment
• Flow
• Perceived quality
• Consumer value
• Rapport
• Brand loyalty

All these elements keep the product and customer journey in mind. These help build and/or improve relationships. 

When you take up advanced product management courses here, you will be learning such concepts in more detail. 

How Audio Technica Improved its Customer Engagement - A Case Study

In this case study of Audio Technica, a well-known commercial and studio headphones brand, we want to highlight how it engaged customers. 

While the brand needs no introduction to audiophiles around the globe, the company aimed to improve its own eCommerce platform and enhance the retail experience. The brand chose AudienceWell, a collective of specialists that provides such types of solutions. 

The Main Challenges

• It was challenging to help customers find the most appropriate product based on their interests. 
• The development team had to provide a fast web experience without the customers or users leaving the site. 
• There were no integrations of multiple or fast checkout payment options with stock management systems. 
• The animations on the site had to highlight how the brand, Audio Technica, and its products are so technologically advanced. 

Understanding Customer Experiences

• Across Europe and the States, they conducted user testing and interviews. 
• It analysed the customer experiences of competitors' customers. 
• It mapped user journeys of the competitors and of Audio Technica. 

The Solution

Based on user testing, it integrated a fresh technical platform built on Adobe’s Magento 2 Commerce. This system was able to create mega-menus, which were instrumental in making search more intelligible. That is, a user could find Audio Technica products based on their areas of interest, ranging from gaming to podcasting. 

To meet all the challenges, the new technical platform was also able to integrate the efforts of marketing and development teams. 

How to Focus on Improving Customer Engagement 

Following and Modifying the Five ‘No Regrets’ 

For the purpose of this section, we want you to go through the framework of McKinsey and Company that highlights how, on an organisational level, a business can increase customer engagement. This article was published a decade back but still holds immense value today. 

1. Holding a customer engagement summit - Bringing together senior managers across functions and units to align on a vision for customer engagement and coordinate activities across touchpoints.
2. Creating a customer engagement council - Establishing an ongoing cross-functional team to translate the summit findings into actions at specific touchpoints.
3. Appointing a chief content officer - Creating a role focused on developing engaging content across channels to feed customer demand for information.
4. Creating a listening centre - Setting up a team to monitor what is being said online about your company and products to enable rapid response.
5. Challenging your total engagement budget - Looking at total spending on engagement across functions to identify cheaper approaches and make cross-functional trade-offs.

Embracing AI while Acknowledging Challenges

Based on what we have been discussing so far, you can see that customers are now more demanding. They need 24/7 support. AI here comes to the rescue. 

Taking customer service as a key component of customer engagement, we can see that most advanced companies can deliver highly personalised and proactive service that handles over 95% of interactions digitally. This is again a stat from McKinsey and Company. McKinsey also states that AI can introduce various challenges. The problem can arise for integrating new technologies with legacy systems. Because it needs to ensure the right talent and governance structures are in place. 

AI can also help in collating huge datasets of target audiences and help in creating meaningful connections with demographics and such. Previously, this would take a long time. In the same vein, leveraging predictive analytics and analysing sentiments on social media can help a business understand how customers behave now and will in the future. 

How to Know When Customers Are Engaged

Let’s give you some examples to show that product marketing efforts are actually able to engage customers. 

• Actively interact with a brand's content, such as liking, sharing, commenting, or creating user-generated content related to the brand. As an indicator of their ongoing interest in the brand, they frequently visit a brand's website, engage with social media posts, participate in surveys, or subscribe to newsletters
• Participate in loyalty programs, accumulating points, rewards, or exclusive benefits for their ongoing engagement and purchases.
• Become brand advocates, willingly recommending the brand to friends, family, or their social circles based on their positive experiences.
• Might feel part of a community created by the brand, interacting with like-minded individuals and feeling a sense of belonging.