The story about audience engagement you’ve been fed by the media industry is fiction. Clicks, views, likes, and other traditional KPIs have been used as measuring sticks of engagement. In today’s reality, they are pretty close to meaningless and valueless. And in many cases, they’re not even measuring human activity.
The basic bargain on which today’s web is based—data in exchange for free content and services—is being renegotiated. These changes are being driven by a convergence of factors, including:
‘Exploitation’ is not a great paradigm for a compelling and rewarding user experience.
Online audiences are sick and tired of being stalked, and that’s driving real change in how we think about and interact with the internet and online content. It’s going to force your organization to reimagine how you engage with your audience—and how you measure, assess, and monetize that engagement.
Audiences aren’t the only ones suffering in this environment. Business performance is also being hamstrung by several factors:
These factors are creating a serious drag on business and marketing performance.
B2B audiences aren’t looking for something exotic. They want a more quid-pro-quo relationship with the companies that provide them with online content and services. They want a more human, engaging, and natural relationship with your brand. And they’re willing to give you what you need to enable that if you deliver value and relevance in return.
Banter’s approach to the problem views audience engagement through both a quantitative and a qualitative lens, with relevance and value as core outcomes for audiences.
This framework proposes engaging individual audience members at scale with immersive, personalized experiences that combine interactive content with conversation. These experiences deliver real-time, first-party data in a more natural, human-centered way that offers relevance and value in return—much like the give-and-take of chatting in person.
It adds a new dimension to the one-way, 20th-century broadcast style of today’s digital content and puts shared value and consent at the center of audience interactions and the exchange of data.
This new framework is a composite of several elements used to judge the level and effectiveness of audience engagement. Unlike the current standard, which quantitatively measures engagement by the number of audience actions, this approach also considers qualitative factors and outcomes. This more holistic standard puts engagement in context with its purpose. Engagement isn’t just for the sake of engagement; it has to be purposeful, providing the audience with tangible value while delivering on business objectives. Key elements of the approach include:
Unlike "Time on Page," we view engagement length as how long an audience member actively engages with an experience. Online experiences should be more tactile and interactive, consistently rewarding users as they make their way through content. This “discovery process” keeps them engaged and encourages them to spend more time with content, products, and services.
An effective interactive experience should include multiple paths of discovery for users to explore. Depth of engagement measures how many of these elements a user engaged with and what percentage of the content experience they completed.
Engagement shouldn’t be a “one and done” action. Progressive engagement is the number of discrete times a user returns to interact with one or more experiences over a period of time. This is a vital element in the collection of first-party audience data, as it allows audiences to provide valuable insights through smaller, more manageable experiences.
The fundamental rationale for interactive experiences is their unparalleled ability to collect valuable data. Appropriately structured experiences deliver far more—and far more accurate—data than traditional registration pages. They make data collection a natural part of the user experience, not an intrusive interruption. That higher-quality experience keeps audiences engaged and creates new opportunities for collecting data such as lead qualification, purchase intent, demographics, interests, and opinions.
Traditional content experiences are generally built around what the business wants the audience to do. This new framework starts with an audience outcome and designs an experience that delivers on that while integrating business objectives as a cohesive part of the experience. This approach better aligns audience expectations with business goals.
Ask ten people what "audience engagement" is, and you’ll get ten different answers. The term has been so loosely defined by the industry that it's laden with jargon.
We think this new model can set a standard for the industry. It adds rigor to what has been—to be charitable—a squishy concept. By aligning business objectives with audience experience and outcomes, it can serve as a model for how a more human-centered, next-generation internet interacts with the people it’s supposed to serve.
