Effective Promotion - Educate, Engage and Engross!

With the ever changing world of marketing, there is a need to evolve the strategies to achieve effective and lasting communication to generate a loyal customer base. 

With the new generation of customers taking center stage, there is a need to understand their usage and behavioral trends. This would enable creation of strategies which would in turn lead to lasting effects.This new generation customer is been constantly looking at active modes of entertainment (which necessitate getting more involved) over the passive ones (like just sitting and watching or reading). To examine this further, lets look at trends in the entertainment and communications industry.

The ever increasing share of active methodologies of entertainment like social media and gaming or pursuing adventure sports in the mode of entertainment over the passive ones like watching movies or reading books clearly insinuates on this evolution. Most surveys and research highlight increasing trend towards modes of communicating which are more engaging and involve more active response. With mobile phones and laptops surpassing televisions in sales and people accessing more facebook than reading books/ newspapers, clearly there has been a greater reception for modes of media which are more engaging.

Hence any corporation looking at effectively promoting their goods or services should essentially focus on ensuring that their promotion contains the 3Es - Educate, Engage and Engross to make sure that their promotion achieves a lasting effect and generates a loyal customer base.

Educate - Educating the consumer helps in two ways. It helps in not just helping create a newer market and creating more market segments. But most times, a customer who has been educated by a particular brand/ product tends to remain loyal to it. Also, it helps in ensuring that the product/ service is used in an optimal way as it has been designed which rather helps in creating higher customer satisfaction too!

Engage - Engaging a customer by games/ events/ contests etc help in getting a mind-share of the customer as well as ensuring greater recognition considering that there is a lot of clutter in the market with constantly increasing product varieties. Also, reports show that higher ability to recollect a particular brand influences buying behavior and which would in turn boost sales.

Engross - Engrossing a consumer would work exceptionally well for goods and services which are big ticket purchases. Big ticket purchases unlike FMCG are made at a lesser frequency and hence engrossing would enable better remembrance and recollection. The most commonly employed mode is loyalty programs. However with ever reducing cost of marketing on internet, engrossing could assume more methods and strategies to ensure that the product stays in the consumer's TOMA.

The success of lot of the companies can be attributed to their ability to engage their consumer. In some companies like Apple, Facebook etc. their product itself is engaging. Whereas automobile companies like Mercedes, BMW etc. go at length to engage their consumers and retain TOMA or influence buying behavior.