Too many brands and content creators focus on driving audience growth and lose sight of maintaining engagement.
Capturing attention is one thing, but retaining attention and building engagement are greater challenges. Ultimately, it costs more to acquire a customer than to keep one.
Let’s examine proven strategies and techniques for boosting audience engagement and exploring methods for building a community around your brand.
Ensure a quality customer experience
First and foremost, we must ensure that customers have a quality experience from the start.
This is founded on building trust early, then reinforced through exceptional customer service and a seamless onboarding process.
Next, ensure you are checking in on customers outside of billing cycles. Gather feedback and resolve issues quickly.
This commitment to a seamless and superior customer experience is the foundation of boosting engagement and retaining customers.
Personalized approach to rewarding customers
Once a customer is acquired, it’s essential to understand and quantify that customer’s lifetime value. This can then be used to reward customers and build relationships based on segmentation.
Dividing an audience into distinct groups allows a business to tailor content, incentives and products and services that best suit their needs, interests and behaviors.
Implementing reward systems
We all love to earn badges and get that gold star.
Gamification is a powerful tool to boost audience engagement to increase your audience’s time and effort investment.
Playing on our need for achievement, earning badges, points, stickers or even monetary bonuses can drive engagement.
Earn badges: The navigation app Waze creates a hierarchy of users based on points.
Earn points for purchases: Starbucks’ app rewards customers with points for purchases, which can later be redeemed for products.
Advocacy and referral bonuses: Create compelling referral bonuses for customers to.
Access exclusive content: Access exclusive content, giveaways, discounts or coupons.
Creating challenges and competitions
Challenges and competitions add an element of excitement and friendly rivalry to user experiences.
Think Peloton’s leaderboard or even Duolingo’s language learning challenges. These challenges and competitions create a sense of competition and community.
Using progress tracking
Use progress bars to motivate your audience to stay engaged.
An example is LinkedIn’s profile strength indicator or their new weekly sharing tracker. The weekly sharing tracker motivates users to post, comment and contribute to articles.
These gamification techniques can improve audience engagement and foster loyalty. Also, just because you don’t have an app doesn’t mean you can’t implement a gamification element.
These could be earning badges as users in an online community, a loyalty program where you earn points or discounts or earn rewards based on desired behaviors, such as the All-State Safe Driver Discount.
Interactive content strategies
Live polls and surveys
These are powerful tools to boost audience engagement. They appeal to the innate human desire to communicate and connect, turning passive viewers into active participants.
Live polls can drive immediate interaction and have been shown to increase engagements by up to 40% compared to traditional surveys.
Polls are also great resources for engaging content.
Create an editorial calendar of polls to engage your audience.
Use interactive elements in video conferencing or virtual event platforms.
Keep polls clear, concise and relevant to the audience’s interests.
Quizzes and contests
Quizzes and contests are excellent tools to captivate audiences and reinforce learning.
They serve as powerful lead magnets but also to increase engagement and opportunities for existing customers.