Audience engagement is one of the most important when it comes to running a successful business. Your customers are integral to your business and without their engagement and commitment to the brand, there’s no profit!
Engaging your audience is a lot more challenging than perhaps it once was. The online domain has become a lot noisier, with more competition all trying to get noticed by their target audience. Real engagement is a long-term process that needs to be worked on regularly in order for it to be consistent.
If you’re not getting enough engagement at the moment, whether it be Facebook, Youtube, Instagram or even your website, then there might be opportunities that you’re missing.
In this article, you’ll learn the best tips to help improve your audience engagement and why encouraging your audience to interact with your platforms, is an essential part of running a modern business in 2022.
Why is audience engagement important?
Customers love to feel valued. They like interacting with brands and feeling like they’re a part of a community. They also like consistency in the content they’re consuming. More than 60 percent of customers will interact through a multitude of channels and despite where they are or what time it is, they expect consistency.
It’s all about providing that customer experience that they can’t find elsewhere and on every social media channel that your business exists on. The more you appear across your customer’s feeds not just on one platform but on multiple, the more likely they’ll be to interact.
If you can further personalize the customer’s experience when engaging with your content, this can influence 38 percent of all digital revenue, according to a study by Microsoft.
9 tips for improving audience engagement
Audience engagement can require a hefty amount of time and effort but it’s a worthwhile payoff for the business over time. Without that regular engagement, it’s only natural that the spotlight on your brand can fade and your competition starts hogging it! Here are nine tips for improving your audience engagement.
1. Utilize user-generated content
It’s quite the luxury if you have users who love your brand so much that they’re creating brand-related content on their feeds. This is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this content, whilst also influencing further engagement with your audience.
A lot of brands and businesses are utilizing user-generated content because it adds a more personable view of the company. With the product being used in its intended way by the content creator, it’s a lot more engageable than a professionally-shot campaign photo.
Your audience will also love the opportunity to be featured on a company’s social media feed, especially if that profile has tens of thousands, hundreds, or even millions of followers.
2. Make your content more accessible
Accessible content is an issue with a lot of websites online. Thankfully, many social media platforms are starting to make their content more accessible through the use of captions, for example.
With less than 2 percent of the world’s top one million websites capitalizing on the disability market, there’s a real issue at hand. By overlooking the disabled, it indicates that the organization doesn’t value or think the effort is worth it, to make content accessible.
Making your content more accessible is a game-changer and it makes you one of the few who are leading the way for a future that’s better catered for accessibility needs.
Use Amberscript’s auto subtitle generator
If you need some inspiration for accessibility tips, then using Amberscript’s auto subtitle generator is a good start. This can help you add valuable automatic subtitles to all of your video content, making it handy for those who are hard of hearing.
3. Get to know your community better
It pays to take the time to get to know your community better. Building a community is the hard part but once you’ve got it, it can be fairly easy to maintain. There are many ways in which you can get to know your community better, whether that be engaging with comments, asking questions on polls, to answering direct messages.
Knowing your audience, what they want from your feeds and how often they want it, can be helpful in delivering high-performing content every time.
4. Host contests or giveaways
Who doesn’t love the opportunity to win something? Whether it’s a contest or giveaway, many of us enjoy the thrill of being in a draw to win a prize that could benefit the winner in a big way. From all-expense paid holidays or just a cheque for $1,000 is a great way to share the wealth and provide experiences for your audience.
It’s a good way to engage your audience, as many of these contests or giveaways will have certain tasks that need to be completed in order to enter. Whether that’s following your social media accounts to commenting on the post itself.
Be sure to pick and choose when you host these giveaways/contests as you don’t want to be doing too many at once.
5. Elevate your visual content with an AI voice generator
Artificial intelligence is something that’s growing greatly in popularity for businesses. This machine-learning equipment is something that can be used for the benefit of many organizations that need help with audience engagement.
A good way to do this is to elevate your visual content with an AI voice generator. This is great for adding professional voiceovers to your video content, which is needed for platforms like Instagram or YouTube, for example. As it’s AI, it helps generate these voiceovers within just a couple of minutes!
6. Ask for feedback
Asking for feedback is a great way to understand what your audience has benefited from and what it’s yet to receive. A platform like SurveyMonkey, for example, is a great way to help create tailored questions that will collate the answers you need. This data can be extremely helpful for providing a greater experience that is going to help the business to make more audience-focused content.
Surveys aren’t always the most enjoyable to fill in but if you’re targeting the right people and asking the right questions, it can be a learning experience.
7. Provide honesty and transparency
It’s always necessary to provide honesty and transparency in how you conduct the business. A lot of customers are going to see through deceit and when you’re trying to engage your customers, they need to be able to trust you fully.
If there’s something wrong, tell them. It’s better to be honest than to try and deceive your audience into believing something that’s not true. It’s not going to win you any favors if you get found out.
8. Schedule weekly social media activities
Weekly social media activities are great when it comes to improving audience engagement. Giving something for your audience to look forward to whether it be an IG Live interview to follow along video content on YouTube, there’s plenty that you can offer your audience.
It’s all helpful towards building that community too and it can give the audience a reason to return back to your platforms, which is the goal. Try to keep it interesting and create a content schedule that’s varied but consistent in its offerings. The more you can post, the better your content is likely to perform.
There’s some great tools out there that can help you plan social media activities effectively. Asana is a good one for content planning and sharing those plans between team members and any involved outside of the organization.
9. Do the research to understand your audience
One of the main improvements to audience engagement is knowing your audience inside and out. Doing the research is important so that you can understand exactly what they want from you as a brand.
Market research is part and parcel of business when you’re setting up but it’s something that’s important to continue. Big data is crucial and it’s worthwhile having analytical platforms that will help gather that information you require as a business.
There are lots of analytical platforms to explore. Google Analytics is a great one, as well as Hubspot having a fairly impressive platform for gathering insightful data. It’s worth exploring what’s available and connecting all your feeds and sites up to these tools.
We fortunately have analytics built into the social media platforms too. This is great for data specific to individual posts and for the profile in general.
Spend the time and effort in improving your audience engagement
When it comes to improving your audience engagement, these tips should certainly help in making a positive start.
Implementing just a few of these tips into your marketing and digital advertising efforts is going to do great things for the business and its brand online.
