Challenges Using Brand Engagement Marketing & How to Meet Them

Imagine your brand as a vibrant community where customers feel they truly belong, a place they seek out and advocate for without prompting. This vision is within reach. When done correctly, your brand engagement strategy can significantly enhance brand awareness and build a sense of community to support business growth. Yet building brand engagement can come with its own challenges. Keep reading to learn more about the pitfalls you might encounter and - importantly - what to do about them.

Brand engagement strategies & community building

In his book, Belonging to the Brand, marketing expert and bestselling author Mark Schaefer labels community “the last great marketing strategy.” He writes, “Helping a person belong to something represents the ultimate marketing achievement. If a customer opts into an engaging, supportive and relevant brand community, we no longer need to lure them into our orbit with ads and SEO, right? What we used to consider marketing is essentially over.”

What makes brand engagement important? Using brand engagement tactics to create a sense of belonging is important because it helps you increase brand awareness and also:

  • Build customer loyalty reducing the need to constantly identify and acquire potential customers, which can be more expensive. After all, some 66% of companies claim their community brand engagement impacts customer retention rates.
  • Foster brand advocacy which leads to organic, authentic promotion, which is often more trusted and influential than traditional advertising. 
  • Increase customer satisfaction to affect customer lifetime value, which helps nurture long-term customer relationships and returning customers typically spend more than new customers. 
  • Encourage user-generated content (UGC) (such as reviews, photos, videos, or personal stories) that support brand authenticity and serves as a valuable marketing asset.
  • Gain insight into consumer thoughts, feedback, and opinions as they will be more likely to share ideas and experiences with your brand.
  • Boost customer engagement across channels including social media platforms, email, in-person events, and websites, which can increase the likelihood of the target audience acting on your campaigns.
  • Create long-term brand equity to keep competitors at bay and be more resilient in times of crisis or change.

To grow your community and increase brand engagement, you’ll need to navigate some common pitfalls. We address those next.

Brand engagement marketing challenges

Great brand engagement requires a deep understanding of consumer behavior and preferences, along with sustained effort coupled with strategic planning. This can prove difficult for even a successful brand. Working with a customer engagement agency can help to boost brand engagement. In the meantime, this section discusses key challenges in increasing customer engagement and offers strategies to navigate them.

Maintaining consistent engagement

Keeping any community consistently engaged over time is a challenge. Audiences may initially be interested in a brand, but that can fade quickly. Especially today, when your existing customers - and potential ones - experience a constant influx of digital content. 

What to do about it: 

  • Create detailed customer personas that represent your ideal customers
  • Map customer journeys to better understand their motivations and create content or experiences that speak to their specific needs 
  • Continuously create high-value content and engaging campaigns on social media 
  • Host community events and use experiential marketing techniques 
  • Give your community a say in product development, branding decisions, or event planning. LEGO Ideas, for example, allows fans to submit their ideas for new LEGO sets. Top-voted designs are eventually produced and sold. 

Balancing personalization with scalability

Personalized interactions drive deeper connections. Yet, as your community grows, striking the right balance between authentic human contact and scalable automation becomes more complicated. If not done strategically and scalably, maintaining personalization in brand engagement can often become resource-intensive.

What to do about it:

  • Use surveys, customer feedback, analytics, and social listening to gather insights about your target demographic’s preferences, behaviors, and pain points.
  • Break your audience into different groups based on shared characteristics like age, interests, location, lifestyle or customer expectations.
  • Recognize that different platforms often have different audience behaviors, requiring tailored approaches.
  • Avoid inconsistency in messaging or tone across channels; that can dilute the brand and confuse community members.

Building trust and authenticity

In an age of influencer marketing, paid partnerships, and sponsored content, consumer skepticism is high. Maintaining authenticity and transparency can be difficult when balancing brand marketing objectives with community engagement. Yet, if consumers feel like your brand is only engaging to drive sales, it can erode trust.

What to do about it:

  • Use insights gained from customer feedback, analytics, and social media monitoring to remain in tune with your audience and adapt your brand messaging accordingly.
  • Work with influencers or brand ambassadors who already have a dedicated social media engagement to provide social proof.

Managing negative feedback and crisis situations

Engaging with your audience opens you up to public scrutiny. In a community setting, people have more outlets to complain or share negative feedback. If you don’t handle this effectively, you can lose customer loyalty and suffer churn.

What to do about it:

  • Monitor social media engagement to navigate complaints in a timely, transparent fashion.
  • Moderate discussions on an ongoing basis to ensure you don’t miss something that can snowball into a public relations nightmare.
  • Put policies in place to prevent toxic behavior within the community.

Sustaining brand-customer alignment

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Your brand will grow and evolve; your customers will do the same. Maintaining alignment between your brand and its community members can be complicated by new market trends, shifts in business focus or target audience, product success, the introduction of new products, and more. 

What to do about it:

  • Be agile so that you can constantly adapt messaging, the customer experience, and brand engagement strategy while maintaining your identity and core brand values.
  • Define your identity to ensure your content is aligned with your brand’s core values and purpose. 
  • Involve your audience in your brand’s story — through user generated content, loyal customers’ feedback, or collaborative experiences — so that they feel like co-creators of your brand identity.

Nurturing a diverse audience

Creating a brand community that includes and engages diverse subgroups can be a delicate balancing act. Maintaining a unified brand message, while recognizing and valuing diversity, requires careful community management.

What to do about it: 

  • Ensure that your members feel heard and valued by encouraging two-way communication (e.g., responding to comments, acknowledging word of mouth marketing).
  • Engage consumers in shared experiences (e.g., events, online challenges, or social media campaigns) to bring people together.
  • Invite community members to join customer loyalty programs. 
  • Encourage loyal customers to become brand advocates.

Handling privacy concerns and data security

You need to gather data around customer behavior and preferences to plan effective brand engagement strategies. However, with increasing consumer concern over how data is used, you also need a privacy and data security policy. 

What to do about it:

  • Be transparent about how you use customer data.
  • Establish and enforce data handling practices (especially across customer service channels).
  • Act swiftly to address any issues as failing to do so can lead to community distrust and damage the brand’s reputation.

Converting engagement into measurable ROI

Marketing strategy always comes down to return on investment, and building a community through brand engagement can be a long-term effort. Immediate sales or measurable outcomes may be hard to come by. Plus, benefits may be indirect, such as increased loyalty or advocacy. 

What to do about it: 

  • Establish the metrics you will use to measure brand engagement and understand customer interactions.
  • Communicate to stakeholders that measurable impact from these marketing strategies may not be evident in the short-term. As noted in a Harvard Business Review article, “In 1983, Harley-Davidson faced extinction. Twenty-five years later, the company boasted a top-50 global brand valued at $7.8 billion.” Why? Increasing brand engagement by building a brand community.

When you understand your audience enough to execute brand engagement marketing effectively you can develop a strong brand identity and build community. Yet this approach is not without challenges. From maintaining consistent brand engagement to managing privacy concerns and proving ROI with engagement metrics, brands must be strategic to overcome these obstacles and boost brand awareness. 

Despite the need to strategically address challenges, investing in a customer-centric approach can pay off significantly in building brand loyalty, brand visibility, customer retention, and organic growth. Find out how A Little Bird can help you improve brand engagement.