Virtual engagement

Virtual engagement is a metric to determine the level of affinity between a company and its customers. In today's internet economy, few things matter as much to marketers as the intensity of the feelings a customer has towards the brand or the product of a given corporation. Marketing professionals are engaging prospects and moving them along the customer engagement cycle to become customers and finally advocates.

Online environments play a critical role for customer lifecycle management, where Virtual events have established themselves as part of the marketing mix. Here, all customer activities take place in a controlled environment, allowing detailed feedback about the level of engagement. The customer engagement index can be used to measure how successful a company is in connecting with its community. It is a metric, derived from an aggregation of behavioral and demographic variables and used for assessing lead quality during events in virtual environments.

Industry analysts have established community engagement as a concept, as it has become clear that companies need to focus on a more granular level on the behavior of individual customers or prospects to determine the strength of the connection they have been able to establish.

The world of marketing and how to most effectively communicate to customers is forever changing. Virtual marketing is the latest change and arguably one of the most exciting. The virtual world gives companies the opportunity to either excel in their market place or fall behind continuously evolving times. Facebook, alone, has 1.23 billion monthly active users (Protalinski, 2014), which creates a virtual platform where marketers can connect and communicate with customers in a way never possible before. They can identify their preferences, tailor and target their advertising and create online conversations and communications. According to Claffey and Brady (2014) word of mouth, or consumer to consumer (C2C) advertising, is very effective and beneficial to consumers as it creates a virtual space where they can communicate with each other. They can inform each other about personal experiences with the company, be it positive and/or negative. The effectiveness of this is seen with Trip Advisor which is increasingly becoming the first port of call for travel information and impacting tourism operators business both positively and negatively depending on consumer reviews.

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