Engagement is such a grand concept that relates to everything from purchasing and repeat usage to satisfaction and recommendation behavior. Customer intelligence professionals want to nail it down and measure their customers’ level of engagement, but they have trouble nailing down a precise model to do so. We have a new case study that details how one organization, Channel 4, the UK media outlet, decoded engagement.

Over a year ago now, Channel 4, the UK media outlet shifted its teen programming from TV to online — not a surprising move, given teen’s media consumption — but it lacked a concrete way to prove the impact of sucha  move. Go-to measures from TV, like reach, didn’t give a complete answer to whether the move to online made sense for C4. So, C4 turned to interactive agency iCrossing, which created a framework that merged traditional and newer measurement tactics to get at engagement with the online game C4 had developed. They mapped the top-line engagement categories from Forrester to the key questions C4 needed to answer, the metrics they’d monitor, and the tools they’d use.

Fig1_Engage_CaseStudy 

C4 further modified iCrossing’s approach to arrive at a flexible, adaptable approach to measure engagement on a variety of projects, not just online games. The advantage of such measurement? C4 can now easily modify marketing outreach and product development and continually learn about its audience.

Read the case study to learn more details. Because engagement is multi-layered and unique to individual business goals, there’s no one right way to approach it. Contact me if you need help thinking through your approach.

And, stay tuned for deeper research on the influence component.