The thing about audience engagement is that you’re the one who must define what it means to you as you set your goals. True audience engagement is essential for what you define. For example, if you mean to get more responses to social media posts, with real conversations happening, that is engagement. And if you want to get more shares for your memes, that’s engagement too.
It’s up to you, but it means that you not only have an audience but also that they do what you want them to do and remain committed afterwards. This doesn’t happen by itself; it happens by design, and part of it happening requires that you set goals for audience engagement.
1. Grow Brand Awareness
The reason you want to grow your brand’s awareness is that it will help more people know about you and your offerings. The more people who know, the more chances you have to make them part of your audience. The more audience members you have, the more opportunities you have for audience engagement.
To grow brand awareness, you’ll want to create content such as white papers, webinars, blog posts and other content that is designed with the goal of brand awareness in mind.
2. Build an Active Community
The very best way to grow and improve engagement is to have more people to engage with in a community environment. When you build an active and vibrant community, engagement will happen more easily because they feel special and part of a group or tribe.
A great way to build an active community today is through Facebook Groups. You can also use software like Ning.com and Delphiforums.com to help you build an active community. You’ll need content for your active community too, such as memes, challenges, infographics, and more.
3. Drive Traffic to Your Website
You’ll want to work on driving traffic to your website because the point of engagement is to get traffic to your website, and then get your visitors and hungry buyers to sign up for your email list so that you can engage with them in new ways. You can use your community and the content that you use to build brand awareness to help you drive traffic to your site. But the site must be set up properly to ensure that you have calls to action which are clear and understandable to your visitors.
4. Generate Leads and Sales
As you grow brand awareness, build an active community, and drive traffic to your site, part of the point of engagement is to generate leads and sales. You can then have engagement with your prospects and customers too. These are the people who will help increase engagement on all your platforms.
When you set these four goals, remember that they’re only goals. You will also need to develop a strategy that allows you to approach these goals, with measurable objectives and tactics that increase your chances of succeeding.
