How To Keep Your Audience Engaged

Audience engagement is a generic term for how much time a user spends with your content or how interested they are in what you (or your business) has to say. No matter what service or product you’re trying to provide as a business owner, audience engagement is key. Successful audience engagement will improve your participation, credibility, user satisfaction, and overall business performance. 

But, how do you know what customers want? Keeping an audience engaged depends on a variety of factors. These can include reading, listening, purchasing, commenting, and even the simple act of clicking around your website. And, depending on your business, you may need more than one strategy to make sure you keep your followers coming back for more. 

So, we’re dedicating a whole post to audience engagement and some strategies you can use to keep your audience focused and ready to hear more! Let’s dive right in! 

How To Keep Your Audience Engaged

Know your target audience.

First things first, you need to know who you’re trying to reach. Is your target audience adolescent females in the workforce? Or is it middle-aged male travellers? With a little research about your target group, you will be able to better curate content for your audience—content that your target audience wants to learn. 

Create an outline.

Before creating any sort of content—whether it be a cool social media post, an informative blog, a great presentation, or a fun podcast—make an outline. This will help you keep your ducks in a row and make sure your content serves its intended purpose. Your outline should include the main purpose of your content, how it will achieve that purpose, who it is intended for, and its method of distribution to the public (Instagram, Twitter, your website. etc). 

Start with a memorable intro.

Nothing draws in followers more than an interesting and intriguing introduction. There are many ways to go about catching your audience’s attention right off the bat. Memorable introductions can include stories, music, humor, a catchy phrase or slogan, a photo or video, a call to action, or even an interesting fact or statistic. And this doesn’t just stop at the intro. Creating memorable moments throughout all of your content is one of the best ways to keep those followers engaged. 

Tell a story.

Need your audience to pay attention? Tell an intriguing story. You can tell a personal story, a story you found in your content research, or even an audience member’s story (with permission, of course.) You can even invite guests to blog or interview. Telling authentic stories that are relevant to your content will not only grab your followers’ attention and keep it, but it will also increase your credibility and trustworthiness. Plus, it will make your readers feel more connected to your content. 

Use concrete/specific examples.

Keeping your audience engaged starts with establishing credibility. Whether your content is true or not—if your audience doesn’t believe what you say—they won’t return to your content for information in the future. So, as you curate your content, make sure your research is thorough. Be sure to back up your claims with facts, statistics, and examples. Most importantly, always cite your sources so that your audience can see that your information came from a trusted and reliable source. 

Provide an opportunity for interaction.

Provide an opportunity for interaction. What does that even mean, you may ask? It means that audience engagement goes both ways. In order for your audience members to feel connected to you and your content, you have to provide the opportunity for interaction. You can do this by creating polls or going live on social media, reading and responding to audience comments, answering audience questions, and even hosting product giveaways and contests. You can include some of these as segements in your content to take it a step further and really provide that feeling of connection.

Check out the Him & Her Podcast for some fantastic examples of helpful, insightful, and engaging Q&A segements.

Be authentic in the way you present yourself.

Always staying true to you is one way to always keep your audience engaged. They won’t feel like they’re tuning into some AI-formatted person, or someone who switches up their personality based on who they’re around or what they’re talking about. Afterall, you garned an audience in the first place for being YOU. Stick to that and stay true to yourself!

For more on building a brand on authenticity, listen to this episode of The Long Game.

Deliever something valuable everytime.

Always provide your audience with something valuable. Whether this is entertainment, a piece of advice, new and fresh inspiration, your content should always leave something behind. Even if it’s something as simple as a laugh! You want your audience to think back on where that laugh, inspiration, or helpful advice came from, and think of you.

Podcasts like Conversations with Cam, Balanced Black Girl, and What We Said are all great examples of brands that incorporate valuable hacks to keeping listeners enterained and engaged.

Stay consistent with what you do.

Staying on a consistent schedule ensures that your audience will always actively engage in what you’re producing. When they know that you post daily/weekly/biweekly, they’re going to tune in for that new update each time. If you randomly post on a Monday one week and a Thursday the next week, they won’t know when or how to keep up! When you have a solid routine, you can become part of your audience’s routine.

For more helpful advice on creating and sticking with a routine, listen to this episode of What We Said and this episode of House Guest.

Be mindful of your color scheme.

While it might not seem like a big deal, followers love a good color scheme. Just think of those websites that you love to visit just because you love the layout, the fonts, and colors and because it’s just so fun to look at. Readers, listeners, customers, whoever, will be much more likely to return to your website or buy your product if it is visually appealing. And, this will help increase brand recognition. Just remember to keep your look authentic – there’s no need to go overboard with flashy colors and fonts. 

Choose easy-to-read fonts. 

If your audience is having trouble reading your content, they are going to seek their desired information elsewhere. A good font should be easy to read, written in a color that is visible on both phones and laptops, and visually appealing. Fonts should also be curated to your target audience. For example, if your target audience is elderly women, you wouldn’t want to choose a small, pink font. Instead, you might want to choose a large font with black letters that doesn’t require a magnifying glass to read. 

Use pictograms.

When curating content, pictures are essential. They help your audience better understand what you’re talking about, and they break up the content. This gives the brain a little break from taking in so much information. In turn, your readers learn more from your content and have higher retention and satisfaction rates. If your readers feel like they are learning from your content, you can bet they’ll be back for more. 

Always finish off with a call of action.

At the end of every piece of content—social media post, podcast, blog post, whatever—end it with a call of action. Give them a reason to engage! Things like “comment below,” or, “share this with a friend,” will naturally lead your audience to doing such. And through this, you can ultimately garner more people, a bigger community, and more engagement.

Increasing your audience engagement is key to increasing the overall success of your content.

When your audience just can’t wait to get their hands on more of your content – you know you’re on the right track! Audience engagement is the key to building a community of loyal followers and increasing the overall success of your business. If you want even content on how to promote and succeed in your area of expertise, listen to the best podcasts about business! For more on podcasting, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle, head on over to the Dear Media Blog. Swing by the DM shop to grab a “Successful Era“ Tee because that’s exactly where you’re gonna be after following these helpful tips and tricks! As always, feel free to drop us any questions or comments below!