Engagement is more valuable than views, clicks, and registration combined. It has the best chance of telling you whether your SDR should pick up the phone to call a prospect. Yet engagement is one of the most challenging datapoints to come to any consensus on. That's likely because there isn't a "single" datapoint, and thus there's no source of truth.
Engagement is broad and dirty and organic. It relies on a target to fire a synapse in a moment in time that likely is untraceable by modern marketing technology.
Imagine you're presenting at a conference. Even if you have a list of everyone who attended your talk, no one's engagement levels in that room are the same. Yet your metrics will blindly record them as a single experience. Your registration data doesn't tell you who was nodding along in attention, who was nodding off, and who was checking their phones.
So an SDR gets that information and it's going to go into the ether of "yet another low-yield followup Marketing is asking us to do."
Then Marketing gets mad. "We spent all that effort on that presentation and trade show! And Sales won't follow up on those leads!"
Then the CFO gets mad. "You guys are spending so much on this, and no one is showing opportunities!"
It's a self-damaging effort—all because engagement wasn't tracked and misunderstood.
Marketing events are hard work. They take a lot of preparation from every discipline and extensive logistics. Even a webinar's value is as mysterious and fickle as a teenager in love. Not a lot to build sales confidence on.
An event marketer with some seasoning could hold those leads back and nurture them. Not exactly what the Sales team wants to hear. But one way Marketing teams can get value from an event is to move contacts into another stage based on event activity and hopefully keep marketing to them until they cry "uncle." They might even assign customer intent (based on the type of presentation). But this is still a presumptive exercise and has no bearing on if the event was "good."
Having been involved in every phase of this process, I can honestly say that there is only one meaningful level of engagement.
"Did they value their time with you enough to remember you?"
If the answer is "no," then you did not produce any meaningful engagement. And any future engagement is going to start from Zero, because they just won't give a damn about your next great campaign.
If the answer is "yes," then you've earned the right to continue building that relationship.
So how should we marketers start to drive better engagement tracking?
