Are consumers really engaging with your site?

Consumer engagement is crucial whether your site is an ecommerce hub or the product page from a manufacturer website. How can you better engage the audience? Simply by improving the quality of the content delivered to the consumer base. However, you may not know how well the content on your site is engaging the audience if you don't have the correct metrics in place. A recent report from Forrester research shows how to better engage the audience.

by Kristina Knight

First, marketers should deploy brand monitoring tools on the website, on social sites and message boards. Why? Because knowing how consumers are interacting with a brand - the good, the bad and the ugly - can help to determine whether or not changes need to be made to a product or marketing campaign.

Second, don't just print out engagement results from your metrics provider; understand them. If you're just reading over reports from a data source it isn't enough. Marketers need to really understand what it means to have consumers sharing photos of products, passing along product information (again good and bad information) and how they engage with the brand after a purchase.

Third, add a dashboard to your site which can share this information with different segments of your company (like the sales, customer service and management). Everyone needs to know how the brand and specific products are faring online. Without this information, future campaigns can go horribly wrong from the start.