As a small business owner or marketing professional, your goal is always to get your audience to see and interact with your message — and achieving that may seem a mystery without a focus on audience engagement.
When you focus on understanding your target audience, you can create content and events that resonate deeply. You’ll be able to track and measure the impact of your marketing efforts, and you’ll be more likely to reach your goals.
Whether your marketing work is offline or online, you’ll see greater results when you first craft a written plan. Creating a marketing calendar to outline your upcoming months or years makes it easier to execute campaigns that engage current and potential customers, regardless of your industry.
Before you schedule time to brainstorm a comprehensive marketing strategy, dig into the concept of audience engagement and what it takes to enhance it. Let’s consider the different marketing channels used to achieve this goal, ways to track effectiveness, and the first steps needed to make it happen. First, let’s unpack the audience engagement definition.
What is audience engagement?
Audience engagement is a marketing goal that focuses on interactive involvement between a business and its target audience. It results in improved influence, loyalty, and trust.
Businesses can build this interactive relationship through online content, in-person events, and any other form of outreach designed to engage a person’s attention in a meaningful way. There are three main levels of audience engagement:
- Primary engagement, which requires a person’s full and conscious attention
- Secondary engagement, including content like a podcast or music that runs in the background
- Tertiary engagement, which consists of content that is barely noticeable consciously yet can make a difference psychologically
For small- and medium-sized businesses, all three levels of audience engagement can make a powerful impact. However, primary engagement is the most effective as it encourages your current and future customers to stop scrolling and take part in whatever message you are sending. They’ll actively click on links, take quizzes, make comments, share content, and — most importantly — strengthen their relationship with your brand.
In short, audience engagement initiates action from your audience. When your marketing message inspires people to take action, your influence grows.
Strategies to boost audience engagement
As you work to develop audience engagement strategies, think about public speakers like Tony Robbins. He’s engaging his audience by bringing a lot of energy to the stage. He walks out clapping and encourages his audience to stand up and clap, too. He screams, “Yeah!” Then, he encourages the audience to follow along.
Within minutes, everyone is energized and receptive to learning whatever motivational message he plans to share. The question is, then, how can we replicate that kind of audience engagement digitally?
There are a few powerful tactics marketers use for this, regardless of the platform.
Understanding the target audience
To engage an audience successfully, you first must have an in-depth understanding of who they are. Something that resonates with retired expats in Europe who love museums won’t be interesting to 20-something recent graduates in San Francisco who love makeup and fashion.
When identifying a target audience, be as narrow in your focus as possible. Consider:
- Demographics such as age, gender, and income levels
- Location
- Preferences, including buying intent and other behaviors
- Interests beyond your specific product or service
- Pain points with a focus on how your business can help
Create a buyer persona to solidify your target audience. In short, this element of the sales process involves creating a character around your typical customer. You even give this imaginary person a name! This makes it easier to create content that truly engages.
Visual storytelling
Scientific research shows that an overwhelming 91% of people prefer visual-based social media content. Why? Visuals — which include photographs and videos — light up different parts of the brain compared to simple text. Simply looking at a face stops people from scrolling, even just for a few microseconds.
Use this psychology to enhance your social media engagement as well as your email engagement, both of which we’ll talk about more soon. Regardless of the platform, know that adding pictures — particularly ones that show emotion — is a simple way to increase interaction.
Personalization
If you’ve ever been in a room filled with children, you know how powerful it is when you can call one by name. People are wired to respond to their names, which is why personalization is an easy yet subtle way to engage your audience.
Of course, adding a name to an email subject line is just the start of this engagement strategy. When you segment your email lists into different groups with different relationships within your company, you can speak directly to each one. For example, consider sending personalized emails based on previous purchases.
A/B testing
Not sure which audience engagement strategy will work? Try two! This is known as A/B testing, and it can help you determine what resonates best with your audience.
Try two ads with the same message but different photos or the same photo with different text. The idea is to change just one variable and then measure the results. In a short time, you can see what works best in terms of engagement. This helps you refine your strategy and stay dynamic.
Having a conversation
Engagement is a two-way street, meaning your marketing efforts should be the start of a conversation with your target audience. Schedule time to respond to all comments on your social media posts. Respond to direct messages. In short, be responsive.
Audience engagement by marketing channel
Here’s a quick look at what audience engagement can look like for the different marketing channels.
Email marketing
We already discussed the power of list segmentation and personalization to enhance email effectiveness. People who have signed up for your email marketing list have already begun to engage with your business, and receiving a direct message in their inbox requires more interaction than simply scrolling.
Here’s an example of how this can work. I recently signed up for a card from my local library and began getting a series of automated emails that got me clicking. It turns out the library lends out more than just books. They have online courses that piqued my interest. With proper call-to-action buttons, the library soon got me spending time browsing the catalog.
Social media
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, offer a fun way to introduce yourself to your target audience and spark engagement. Yet, it isn’t always easy to shift their behavior from the passive scroll to true interaction and engagement.
One way to do this is through influencer marketing. With this strategy, you collaborate with someone who has a following consisting of your target audience. You create a strategy and a contract with the individual, who then shares your message and brand with their audience. This may include a giveaway, raffle, how-to series, or other strategy designed to get people actively engaged.
Events
In-person events offer the easiest way to get your audience engaged, as they’ve already gotten off the couch and arrived wherever you are. But what about virtual events? Yes, you can create a live-streaming event that draws in your audience!
To make your virtual event successful and engaging, start by creating a plan to promote it. Know the goal for the event, decide on the best platform based on where your target audience spends time, and then schedule automated emails to alert them to tune in.
Don’t forget to give them a good incentive to watch your livestream. Follow the best practices and add a call-to-action at the end of the stream that includes a discount code or another valuable offering available only to those who commit to engaging.
Content & SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, doesn’t necessarily sound like a very engaging topic, but that’s exactly its goal. When you research and use keywords your audience is searching for, you can provide interactive content based on what they want to know.
For example, you can combine visual storytelling for video SEO content. You can create online quizzes that lead to a landing page on your website. You can provide free eBooks or interactive checklists that people can download when they sign up for your email list. Be creative when you curate content to get more people clicking.
Tools to track audience engagement
All these strategies are worth exploring, but you need to know what really works for your business. Within your marketing strategy, add a section that explains the measurements you’ll use to track whether your efforts are moving you toward your goals. These are known as KPIs or key performance indicators, and they will vary with each platform.
Email reporting & heat maps
With email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, you’ll find a robust backend filled with data used for email reporting. Take time to get familiar with all the different ways to track your success because this is a powerful tool that saves you time and money.
Start with your email heat map. This is a visual representation of how people are interacting with your email campaign. You’ll see the percentage of people clicking on your call-to-action buttons, a metric known as a “click-through rate.”
You may wish to track other metrics, too. For example, the click-to-open rate (CTOR) tracks the percentage of people who received your email, opened it, and then clicked on a link. In general, this will be a surprisingly small percentage — but these people are truly engaged in your message.
Don’t rely on the CTOR as your only metric. New regulations make these reports, especially from Apple users, less reliable. It’s best to track a few measurements to get the clearest picture of your success.
Social media reporting
Social media marketing can certainly take up time, especially when you’re trying to offer engaging content. Instead of spending a lot of time on the backends of each platform, try combining your efforts through integration.
Constant Contact, for example, offers integrations for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can also connect your Buffer and Hootsuite accounts, making it easier to schedule posts. These systems make it easier to track results and adjust your campaign to enhance audience engagement.
Events reporting
Both in-person and virtual events require measurements to determine what works and what needs improvement. Thankfully, this reporting process doesn’t have to take extra time when you can integrate it into one system. Constant Contact offers integrations for Eventbrite and WooCommerce, allowing a comprehensive analysis of the engagement happening before, during, and after events.
Google Analytics
Often, campaigns are designed to lead customers to a landing page. This is the heart of what is known as a sales funnel, which starts with a large net at the top to grab as much interest as possible. Then, with a strategic customer journey, these prospects become loyal customers.
A common way to track this process is through Google Analytics. Yes, Constant Contact allows you to integrate this tool, too.
Audience engagement starts with a great message
Whatever your message, you want your marketing efforts to have a reverberation. To ensure this, you can follow the best practices to connect on the primary audience engagement level for maximum attention.
Tools and measurements are crucial for your success, but first, you need to brainstorm a message that will resonate deeply with your target audience. Narrow down their pain points and interests — how can you creatively connect your product or service to this? Think about different strategies for getting customers to spend time with your content, as this, in turn, will get them engaged with your message.
Once you have a campaign idea, you can begin the process of writing your marketing plan. Then, you can create content and deepen your relationship with your customers.
Next, download our Revive and Thrive one-pager to learn more ways to boost audience engagement.
