How do you build an engaging brand that wins over its customers, employees, and even harshest critics? Today you’ll learn about brand engagement and why it’s so important if you want to grow fast.

“When you have these dips in processes, you wonder why. It’s because the user was supposed to be at the front stage, and not in the middle, and definitely not last.”
-Taye Johnson, CUNY Tech Prep Program

In this episode of Growing Brands, we’ll talk about the basics of brand engagement, how to measure it, and how to find the brand touchpoints that are capable of creating rapid growth for your company.

Plus, we’ve got special guest and engagement expert, Taye Johnson, to share her approach for measuring how people interact with technology and what impact it has on their perceptions of a brand.

Stay tuned... but first, download our free complete list of brand touchpoints here:

What's Brand Engagement?

Brand engagement, simply, is the act of making contact with a brand.

Given this broad definition, brand engagement constitutes a practically limitless list of activities that one can participate in with a brand, also called touchpoints.

Here are ten examples of brand touchpoints:

  1. Interacting with company employees
  2. Visiting a company’s website or blog
  3. Exchanging DMs with the brand’s handle on Twitter or Instagram
  4. Commenting on the brand’s Facebook page
  5. Using the company’s app
  6. Applying for a job at the company
  7. Visiting a brick-and-mortar store
  8. Billboards, digital ads, direct mail, etc.
  9. Attending a branded event
  10. Talking to someone about a brand

As someone with limited resources, you probably want to know which touchpoints to invest in if you want the brand to grow as fast as possible. Good question.

What Types of Brand Engagement Are Important?

It isn’t feasible to invest in every form of brand engagement possible. And so it becomes really important to know which ones contribute to the business goals.

Conceptually, we need to study how people feel about our brands on three levels:

  • What does the brand do for them (i.e., utility)?
  • What does the brand say about them to other people (i.e., perception/status)?
  • How does our brand help them relative to the other brands in the space (i.e., competitive)?

In practice, this is where machine learning and AI represent a huge opportunity. The most sophisticated analytics programs all use this basic formula:

  1. Make every brand touchpoint measurable and send it to a big database
  2. Use machine learning to learn which touchpoints are most associated with business outcomes like new users, active users, revenue, and profit
  3. Create and test models for what happens when you adjust the different factors
  4. Use all of the resulting data and insights to invest in marketing strategies, channels, campaigns, and tactics

How Do You Measure Brand Engagement?

OK, we know engagement is important and how to leverage it, but how do we measure each and every touchpoint?

For that, we reached out to Taye Johnson, an Advisory Board Member at the City University of New York Tech Prep program. Taye is also the Data Analytics Manager at Eidolon, the Community Coordinator at the NYC Chapter of Women In Data, a facilitator of Google’s #IamRemarkable Initiative, and member of Badassery. This is what she said...


Watch the interview to see Taye answer these questions:

  • How do websites and applications influence how people feel about a company or brand?
  • How do you identify the moments that matter most to consumers/the brand?
  • What advice do you have for people who want to set up an analytics program that can effectively measure brand and user engagement with a company?

Brand Engagement, In Closing

If you liked this episode then take a few seconds to follow or subscribe to this channel. Or head over to brandata.com to download our mega list of brand touchpoints for handy reference.

Ok, it’s your turn…

What touchpoints are most important to your brand? How does brand engagement influence your marketing strategy, operations, and tactics?

Let me know by leaving a comment real quick before you leave.

Transcript from our interview with Taye Johnson:

How do websites and applications influence how people feel about a company or a brand ultimately? Honestly, I feel like this is one of those trick questions that can either be very technical or very much business-like, and for me as a technologist, there's a lot of different ways that we are able to use KPIs in order to make sure that users are actively engaged, but we also need to know what are we looking for? You have to know what you wanna track first before you build any type of foundation. So, if you wanna make sure that your brand is recognizable just from an image, that's something that you have to be very mindful of doing, and it usually is your logo. And there are very distinct logos that we have within our cabinet, for example, that we are able to identify with from an early age. And depending on how marketing is set up, if you continue to see a logo over time, you become curious. That was something that was done on purpose. But again, that has to be said, as in, "Hey we wanna make sure "that our brand is recognizable no matter "where you are within the world." So I think a lot of times, it's more of a "I feel more familiar with the brand "because my mom used it when I was a kid." There's a lot of things that can factor in to what we think about a user using a particular brand or company. That's excellent information. So, how do you identify the moments that matter most to consumers or the brand? I would have to say for me, again from a more technical perspective, we always think about conversion rates. And we always think about who comes back to our platform? Because when times we have areas where things will fall off in terms of a users will be really engaged, and we got them, and we get so excited, and then we're like, somewhere along the process they dropped off. So we always think about why did someone drop off? And how can we get them back. And you see things like reward programs, we're always thinking about how can we have an incentive to kind of guide our re-users so that they feel like they're, that we're not just this one off company that they only see very rarely. So, a lot of things that we have within tech is geared around making sure that we can have active engagement for a long time period. And when we see those drops in engagement, we try to filter in ways to bring people back onto our platform so that we can continue to have engagement. Yeah I love that concept of looking at engagement and using that as a way to translate to how people are feeling about the brand or how they're engaging with the brand. So, what advice do you have for people who want to set up an analytics program that can effectively measure brand and user engagement, within a company? I would have to say for an analytics program, now this is going against all of the things I've learned in coding boot camps. You never ever want to think about building any types of systems without having the user in mind. And when I think about myself as a user, what am I going to get from a platform? And a lot of analytic programs are not built that way, it's like "what do we need to do for the business" "how are we going to make money?" Very rarely do people think about the user as a first step. I always think about solving problems from the issue first and working backwards. And for an analytics program you have to be the same way. We can already identify the things that we would want to track, that's fine, but why are we doing it? It's the why aspect of user engagement of building software development apps. There's so many different elements that kind of fall on the back burner. And when you have these dips in processes you wonder why. It's because a user was supposed to be at the front stage and not in the middle, or definitely not at the last. Yeah, I love that, I couldn't have said it better myself. Taye thank you so much for your time and expertise, really appreciate it.