3 Ways to Engage Your Audience

Holding your audience’s attention is a challenging task and requires extra effort from marketers. In order to keep your audience engaged over time, you have to come up with some effective engagement strategies to serve the audience in the best possible way.

Remember — there is a huge difference between getting people to follow your brand versus turning the followers into one-time buyers and then loyal long-term customers. You may have thousands of followers but experience little to no engagement from them.

Will the receiver get enough information to act, or will they be left with more questions that prevent them from taking action? Will they care? Will they be moved or touched, in some shape or form? These are important issues to consider in the design of your strategy and assets to engage with your audience.

Now, the combination of engaging and emotional will also make some impression on how credible your brand is perceived to be, as the messaging and emotional content, combined with the level of engagement, will give them a strong impression of whether you can be trusted or not. You know the saying, if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Make sure your message is honest and that you are as credible and trustworthy as possible.

As a marketer, it’s your job to figure out how to increase audience engagement and try out suitable strategies that match your brand’s truth and positioning. So, here are 3 ways to engage your audience. Remember, these are just a few principles that may help you formulate a strategy to better interact with your audience in a way that boosts engagement. So, keep on reading to find out more.

Compelling Storytelling:

The art of storytelling is one of the old, but reliable ways to get the attention of your target audience. That’s because stories involve emotions and are capable of touching the hearts. The story should include a piece of information related to the brand truth to help the audience create a perception of the brand. It should also have an emotional element that is strong enough to make them feel moved or touched, and that makes them change behaviours. While creating your marketing strategy, it is important for you to consider the emotional impact of your story on the minds of the target audience.

Volkswagen’s “Think Small” campaign is the definition of a millennial campaign. Created in 1960 by Doyle Dane & Bernbach (DDB), the campaign set out to answer one question: How do you change people’s perceptions not only about a product but also about an entire group of people?

Americans always had a propensity to buy big American cars, and even fifteen years after World War II ended, few if any American were buying small German cars. But the economy was struggling, as repairs of those big American cars were pricy and also had to be done by dealerships, plus gasoline was expensive.

The VW Beetle was the complete opposite: low gas consumption, easy to fix yourself, and cheap parts. So what did this Volkswagen advertisement do? It played right into the audience’s expectations. “You think I’m small? Yeah, I am”. They never tried to be something they were not, but they did it in a very simple, yet compelling way.

In other words, while going out of your way to engage your audience, avoid playing the game of ‘pretend’. Instead, confidently show the benefit of your brand, product or service that makes it unique and capable of standing out from the crowd. Remember, your audience lives in the digital era with fast-paced technology, which means they can find out if you are being honest or just attempting to deceive them.

Organize a Giveaway:

Another well-proven way of audience engagement is organizing giveaways. I mean, who doesn’t like gifts? People love getting free gifts and discounts, especially when a brand gives away one of its value-content or products for free. Not only can you attract more followers, but you also boost the overall audience engagement.

A giveaway is a gesture of kindness, love, and care. A marketer should design a giveaway campaign by including ways for the audience to engage with the brand. It can be small steps like liking your page, sharing your post, tagging others or asking them to sign up to your newsletter for more value-content, and many other engaging activations.

Take the example of Kapten & Son. When the accessory brand reached the milestone of 700,000 followers on Instagram, it decided to thank its audience by hosting a giveaway. As the strategy requires every interested participant to interact with the brand, the giveaway led to more audience engagement.

This strategy may also help you gain some long-term customers and increase the brand awareness as more people will like the page, which then will trigger the algorithms of the social media platforms for more reach, or give you access to more people that interact, connects and engages with your brand over a longer time span.

Although giveaways are not one of those go-to marketing strategies that would give you instant engagement all the time, you can still rely on them. Hosting a giveaway every once in a while would provide your audience with a reason to stay connected and engaged with the brand. Gifts make people happy, and a happy customer is always a good thing.

Speaking of — I am giving away two of my brand strategy templates that I use to gain clarity around a brand truth, as well as the brand positioning statement — › Click here to get them for free!

Create Compelling CTAs:

Short for ‘Call To Action’, CTAs are referred to as small catchy phrases that brands often use to prompt their customers to take action. You see them on numerous social media platforms, marketing emails, and landing pages. Some examples of CTAs include “Click Here!”, “Buy Now!”, “Download Now,” and many more. These phrases may seem insignificant, obvious, and even at times annoying, but they do attract the target audience and increase audience engagement effectively to take action.

What’s more, CTAs act as the first step in turning prospects into engaging and paying customers. You may not realize it, but most people simply do as they are told. If it is repeated, with variation, the CTAs are highly effective. Needless to say, formulating effective CTAs is crucial for the sales funnel.

An energetic CTA that combines a sense of urgency with a power verb can get your target audience to engage and take action. When your CTAs portray strength and confidence, the customers are likely to perceive your brand to be the same way. Make sure to show enthusiasm using the call-to-action approach and try using words that encourage and motivate. When customers feel excited and energetic, they are more likely to buy from you.

Why it matters

Despite being a challenging task, audience engagement is possible if you know your audience and execute effective strategies. I hope that you enjoyed the 3 ways to engage your audience and found them helpful and interesting. The strategies mentioned above are just some of the ways you can increase audience engagement for your brand. Regardless of which strategy or tactic you choose, always stay true to the core values, positioning and promise of your brand.

And — if you want my free brand strategy templates, you can get access here

Be safe — stay awesome!

// Arnt