Engagement is crucial to success with any marketing campaign, let alone social media. If you are not receiving engagement, then a marketing campaign is considered a failure.
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SO WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT?
Engagement can be considered where someone has ‘touched’ a brand in a valuable way. For example, in the physical world a person on the street corner handing out brochures, would consider someone has engaged with a campaign, when a person has taken a brochure and given their brochure a glance.
Engagement for a road billboard ad, would be when someone has at least partially read a billboard while driving.
For an online ad or piece of content, engagement would be when someone has clicked on the content and interacted with it or had a significant view (they have taken in what the content is).
The more engagement you receive from an audience that is considered a target audience, the more successful your campaign will become.
So what are the points that create an increase in engagement with an audience?
RELEVANCE
Your content is only as good as it is relevant to your audience. Understand your audience, their needs and wants, what it is that makes them emotionally charged and what are their interests. Conduct a survey with them to find out more and use that as a guide to increasing your knowledge in the area of understanding how your going to create more relevant content for them.
An example of relevant content would be: If you were a tea company, your customers asked for what tea pots would create the best tea and you created content around which style tea pots are best for keeping tea at its best. This would definately receive signifcant engagement.
If however, your customers or audience asked what tea pots created the best tea, and you decided to talk about why tea is better than coffee, this wouldn’t create much engagement for you – as this is not signifcantly relevant to your audience.
INSPIRATION/CONTROVERSY
Controversy is one of the best ways to create engagement. In fact controversy since marketing was first put into practice, has been used to create engagement. The old ‘freaks’ shows back in the 19th century attracted crowds by the thousands, as they caused a talking point and were controversial. The current US President used controversy to create engagement in his political campaigns to increase his marketing amongst his target audience.
However, businesses try to shy away from controversy. And that is understandable.
An alternative for controversy is inspiration.
Inspiration and inspiring your relevant audience is a fantastic way to drive engagement. How do you know what inspires your target audience? Find out who they are following, what people make them get into action. What are the traits of these people and what are their achievements.
If you are a tattoo artist, you can certainly be inspirational by showing some of the amazing artworks you have created and talk about the testimonials you have had from your previous clients. Also, by becoming an opinion leader in the field of tattoo art, you are becoming an inspiration for those aspiring to a success in the field. Create content which shows off your knowledge and shows success. This is inspiration, and this does receive engagement.
VALUE
A very simple way to create engagement, is to look at what is valuable to your audience and then deliver that.
What is it that your audience will treasure and accept as something that is valued?
Could it be some tips on how to run longer distances, if you are a running shoe brand?
Is it giving advice on how to save taxes immediately, if you are an accountant?
Find out what your audience treasure and deliver it!
At Attention Experts we use these three points to lift our engagement on campaigns. If it is not valuable, relevant or controversial/inspirational – than it rarely receives engagement.
If all this fails, then you really need to assess the audience its being delivered to and ask:
Is this the right audience?
Do I know enough about my audience? (If not, survey them!)
If you’ve read to this point, you’re likely very interested in the above and should give us a call for a strategy session. Our number is (02) 8069 9796 (02) 8069 9796 if outside Australia), or message us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/attentionexperts. You can also book a meeting with us via our website at www.attentionexperts.com – I would be very happy to run through some of the above strategies with you in more detail.
