Music Engagement marketing is a process of telling your story about your products, programs, and services. It isn't selling. It's making contact and telling people about what you do. Engagement marketing is reaching out and having conversations with your customers and potential customers. The important word here is conversations. Customers should be having two-way conversations with you. You should not just be talking to the customer. You should be trying to engage your customer in conversation. Why do we want to engage? You want to be part of your customers' conversations and their communities. You want to reach out and take part in the things that your customers do. This means not only should you be writing on your own blogs, websites, and discussion boards. You should be reaching out and participating on your customers' websites in their discussion boards, commenting on their blogs, and participating in their online events. Part of engagement marketing is showing customers that you can be part of their needed solutions. You don't want to be part of the noise that surrounds them every day. One of the main goals of engagement marketing is to increase the number of touches on your program. This is the number of times someone hears about your program, products, or services. Let's talk a bit about a concept called Continuous Touch. In the old days, we used to be able to sell a class or certificate with three or four touches. Now we must continuously reach out and touch the customers through multiple channels. These channels could include paid ads in the paper, postcards, social media, Facebook, emails, and newsletters. We have to continuously reach out and engage with the customer. In our traditional marketing, let's say we had a new certification program in business marketing. The old way to market that to get through four touches was to add it to the quarterly schedule, maybe send out a flyer to a purchase business list, you'd go to a chamber meeting and talk about it, and create a brochure to pass out. Usually, that was enough touches to sell the class and get enough students to make it go. With Continuous Touch, we want to attempt to get our certificates and classes in front of the customer as much as possible. Engagement marketing helps us with this. Let's look at an example. If we have a new certificate in SEO, we might insert it in our schedule and put it on our website. We could write an article on the new certificate for the Chamber blog and then refer to it in other posts on other sites. We would have our instructor discuss it on post to his LinkedIn site. We'd run ads on Google AdWords promoting the new certificate and target our local area. We would mention it frequently on our Google Plus and other blog pages. We could send flyers to pass students in SEO and AdWords classes. We could also send targeted emails to pass business students. We could introduce the instructor in his background on our website and mention the new class. And finally, we could have the instructor post information on the class on this website. With engagement marketing, it's all about content. Content, content, content. You need to create lots of high quality content to reach out and engage your customers and potential customers. People always worry that they won't have anything to talk about in engagement marketing. That won't be a problem for you. Community and continuing education programs have tons to talk about. Take a moment and pause this video and look at the list above. There's 25 different ideas for things you can talk about in your engagement marketing. Work on creating two-way conversations with your customers. This can come in the form of questions, hosting discussions, creating small contests, asking for pictures, anything that gets your customers to respond to you and to add to the conversation. Engagement marketing is not about advertising. It's about having conversations and sharing information with your customers. Remember the rule of content, 4-to-1. That means you have to post 4 content stories to every one mention of one of your classes or programs. You do not want to use your engagement as just a chance to advertise to your customers. Measure and track all your engagement efforts. You want to see what works for your program and what doesn't work. Most social media websites have some sort of measuring capability. Use this to track which of your stories and posts do the best and which aren't succeeding in engaging your customer. The easiest and most powerful way to get great measurements is to ask each student, where did you hear about this class when they register? This will tell you a lot about which of your advertising is working and which of it isn't. It's also very inexpensive as you can have them fill it out as part of their registration process or have your receptionist ask the question on the phone. Google Analytics is a great free tool for measuring activity on your website. As you tag each page, Google Analytics takes many measurements of what your customers are doing on your site. Many other social media sites also have tools like Google Analytics for giving you feedback about what your customers are doing. Remember social media is not just about text. Make sure to use plenty of videos and pictures. You will find that your customers respond to pictures and videos more than they do to text. Finally, make sure to have some fun with your engagement marketing. People won't read what is boring, have some fun and be creative with what you write and post. Good luck. Thanks for watching.