Engaging audiences to create deeper relationships

PR Newswire: The Age of Engagement
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Creating a blog. Website, or digital marketing creative is only half the battle it’s engaging you audience so that they come back time and again to view, interact, laugh, forward or even just click on your site that is the real challenge. This week I am going to look at some tips on how to engage your audience in a way that creates a deeper connection with them.

The following is a combination of my ideas and ones from Zoomerang.

First it is important to reach your audience where they are so find out what websites they frequent and what social media they use most. Are they tweeters, bloggers or facebook-aholics.

Great ways to reach your audience is to blog and add to your blog a space where your readers can rate your posts, add comments, and even post discussion topics. Even try planning events or parties, identify trends and make use of them (of course with your unique twist). For your twitter audience engage existing followers and attract new ones one way to do this is by re-tweeting, create a multi-way conversation. Try using incentives with surveys to get people involved.

Second grab their attention!!!! Focus on hot topics to spark conversation like: industry news, product enhancement, new website design, event or party venues, status/wall posts.

Finally ask short relevant questions from your audience; gather the info you need in a concise way no one wants to take the time to read long winded questions or a million of them. After wards share your results, your audience put the time and effort into participating in surveys, polls, commenting, ranking so the least you can do is share. Do it the easy way by posting a share link on the Thank You page of a survey. Post real time results to questions by adding a widget on your website or blog. Post results on Facebook or Twitter feeds.



Another way to look at creating deeper relationships is by remembering that content is king. Ardath Albee a B2B Marketing strategist and CEO of Marketing Interactions suggests that the best way to engage with your target audience is by building credibility through content marketing. Here are the stages she says to follow I found them useful because they show the practical issues that have to be tackled.

Stage 1: Define Digital Marketing Mission

“This stage is about setting goals about what you want your digital strategy to achieve. If you define the mission of creating customers, for example, the underlying question is just how you can use digital means to accomplish this level of conversion. That means content. For digital doesn't exist without content.
It is during the goal stage that you must take a deep dive into the types of customers your strategy should create, come to understand their needs and priorities and how they conduct themselves within the digital environment.”

Stage 2: Derive the Digital Strategy

“Armed with the information you developed in Stage 1, you're now ready to determine how to fulfill your mission by selecting the core elements for inclusion in your digital marketing strategy. Once you have specified the delivery vehicles (e.g. website, social media platforms, email, etc.), prioritized your channels and metrics for accountability you'll have the insight you need to determine what type of content to develop.”

Stage 3: Derive the Interaction Strategy Across the Customer Lifecycle

“Based on Stages 1 and 2, your task is to develop content storylines based on the goals you're tasked to achieve and the fulfillment components you've selected. This is the critical impact point for content marketing. In addition to consistent messaging, with digital, all components must be integrated to work together in achieving your goals.”

Stage 4: Measure and Improve ROI

“This stage is all about measuring the performance of your content and the interactions it generated for your digital marketing strategy. Based on goals and the metrics you chose, how well did your content perform? “

Review Existing Capabilities

"Before you start investing in content marketing, you must determine what overall processes exist, the resources available and the obstacles to using them. Here are a few things to consider:
• Can you update the content on your website and blog, as well as create and send emails without IT assistance? Or, do you need to plan for a 3-week wait in the queue to get a new content resource coded and posted? Timing is important, so make sure you can plan appropriately.
• What are the capabilities of your email marketing tools? Are they integrated with other reporting or will you need to manually compile results from other analytics tools to attempt to prove the outcomes you've achieved?
• Do you have lead and customer management processes in place that the technology and tools will support in execution? What about editorial processes and branding guidelines? Must legal review and approve content before it can be published?
• What resources do you have available to develop content? At what capacity?"


Finally just like any other relationship the best way to engage someone else is through communication and shared interest. Therefore make sure you know what you are talking about, so do the homework to back up your ideas or campaign. Also usually people don’t want to hear only what you have to say they want to put in their two cents, so listen! Open up the floor and let them comment and contribute because in the end people feel engaged when they feel involved.