Updating The Engagement Marketing Definition

Jason Falls aims at the heart of marketing with his post "What is engagement and how do we measure it.

He believes the critical way to define engagement is to ask?

^{"Did you get something from your audience that can make your business better?
That can mean profits. You sold stuff = Successful engagement.
That can mean ideas. You got feedback on your product or service you can use = Successful engagement.
That can mean referrals and recommendations. You got customers to tell other people you’re cool = Successful engagement.
That can mean digital merit badges. You got people to link to you, follow you, Re-Tweet you = Successful engagement."}

Now I've previously discussed how engagement marketing is defined:

"Because the term marketing is commonly interpreted to mean only the process of promotion of a company, I use the term engagement marketing to explain the process of listening to customers and taking action on what they have heard. To me engagement marketing covers each of the four P's of marketing including promotion. Engagement marketing really means “marketing,” but it is better to support or coin another marketing related phrase such as “engagement marketing,” in order to explain how the process of marketing works best when a strategy of listening and taking action upon what a company has learned as a result of what is learned is used."

This definition of the term engagement marketing was from my previous effort at defining the term.

In using the word engagement I was thinking about the actions of a company towards its clients, how the company engages with the customer. Whereas Jason and a lot of the industry think about engagement in terms of how the customer engages with a company. 

Jason's article really gave me pause for thought, I suddenly thought; "hey why not combine the two definitions into the same term, Engagement Marketing?" Engagement marketing would be both the process of the customer taking an action towards a company, and it is the process of a company engaging customers for all of the reasons Jason relates.

One interesting aspect of this combination is that VRM Vendor Relationship Management would then fall within the engagement marketing term, whereas I was just thinking of engagement marketing as the process of outreach for marketing success. VRM is the idea that customers manage their own data, and relationships with vendors, pushing out a request for a proposal or bid that vendors can reply too, or managing their own data, and when updated, alerting all vendors automatically.



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