Now more than ever in history, online audiences are the largest audiences, replacing major events, sporting contests, and all other physical congregations of people with a variety of digital surrogate experiences.
Primarily because of social distancing measures, digital interactions now predominate as the primary mode for personal and professional activities.
In times of crisis (as now) community strength and support becomes central to coping and cooperative response. Correspondingly it becomes critical for publishers to foster, support, and manage their audiences with more vigorous attention.
Many will find a virtuous (and ultimately profitable) dynamic between community interaction and customer advocacy which can be sought without much incremental effort, and the right tools. This post is intended to provide some guidelines toward fostering that virtuous dynamic.
Firstly, what do we mean by digital audience engagement? Generally, we mean the amount of attention customers give to our business or brand.
Here are some common engagement measurements.
- Pages Per Visit
- Time Spent
- Interactions (votes, likes, bookmarks)
- Social Shares
- Attention Data given (e.g. comments, polls)
- User Registrations
- Newsletter signups
- Bounce Rate (a measurement of poor engagement)
Some measurements are more important than others, depending on the nature of your business and strategy, but all will help you better understand how to measure, then grow, your audience, via various tactics.
In what follows, I offer some focus areas to consider.
Foster, Love, and Manage an Audience Community
If you love your work or your mission, it shouldn’t be hard to welcome and support your audience of current and potential customers/consumers. Here are some core approaches to consider:
- User Registration. Grow your first-party data and marketing potential by allowing users to create an account with you. But don’t ask for something for nothing; do outline the ample benefits for registration in a concise benefit statement. Use a simple customer data platform, or your email newsletter system for starters, to gather or augment your customer marketing lists.
- Email Newsletter Signups. Include a prominent way for the user to sign up for your e-mail newsletter (and if you don’t have one, get one and work a separate strategy for email). Include push or exit-initiated modal dialogs for these signups, but avoid popping these dialogs for users who already get your newsletter, lest you alienate your existing, earned email audience.
- User Personalization. Where you have users registered, make an effort to customize their experience to their expressed preferences… and allow them to share and fine-tune their interests through progressive registration (which means – obtaining supplemental information in context at later stages after initial registration).
- User Comments. Absolutely allow and enable Comments and commentary, and apply automated anti-abuse measures to keep things as clean as your brand requires. Vuukle has great solutions for this, including the truly differentiated AI powered Toxicity Meter to proactively notify users when what their typing has become too toxic to be allowed.
- Customer Feedback. Always allow feedback to be submitted, and always provide a two-step response: 1) an automated “we received your feedback and it is important to us” message; and 2) a human response, ideally with a person’s name signed on it. People can be genuinely impressed and lifelong customers created by this simple step. Every person in your company should be interested to participate in responding to customers. People can volunteer for the privilege. See how that works!
- Manage Abuse. Use tools to manage against spam or general abuse. Vuukle also has great AI-based solutions for this, including the truly differentiated Toxic Meter to proactively notify users when what they’re typing has become too toxic to be allowed. Customize automated services by tending to your blocked terms list, and blocking abusive sources by IP, etc.
Make That Visit Count! Editorial Operations & Workflow Considerations
When there is a superabundance or a glut of news, entertainment, or branded content, every consumer interaction becomes more important. Customer acquisition is relatively more challenged by the increased volume of customer attention options. So, for every acquired visitor, it’s well worth the analysis and planning to make the most of that visit. Some ways to do so:
- Spur conversation with leading or provocative questions in the content body. And please note, you don’t need to be sensational in order to be interesting and to express an earnest desire to hear what your customers think.
- Support your audience with every word and message you send. That counts for brand marketing efforts, as well as every one-to-one customer interaction whether it be on Twitter, in your comments, or in the human responses given to customer feedback. And yes, you should send a human response to every piece of customer feedback (which is not spam), as above.
- Use real-time tools to find out what is working for your audience, and AMPLIFY IT. Tools such as Google Analytics Real-Time, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, and the Vuukle real-time dashboard can enable you to find an opportunity as it happens. When a post trends, be sure it is optimized for engagement. Create and tune a checklist for what to hit when a post trends. Include some of the above, such as: ask a provocative question; include a signup form; ask users to share; post related content mid-post or as next-step content, etc.
Then and Now
Not long ago, companies shied away from allowing user-generated Comments or commentary on their publications or brand messages. Brands complained it was too hard to prevent abuse; the trolls, the spammers, etc. And apart from risks, brand strategists disagreed on the business benefits of allowing community action within their brand umbrella. A Twitter presence was created, and not much more in many cases.
Anecdotally I can say from my experience as a product leader for multiple online brands [including Interactive One a long time Vuukle partner], my business stakeholders pushed us all over the shop about user-generated anything. We went through phases where Comments or user uploads were critical, too risky and thus removed, to be “replaced by Facebook comments” or “Disqus on Facebook” buttons, back to Comments again. We had a few brands with true user registration and accounts, but for most of our publishing and media purposes content-based commentary and user feedback form management were sufficient. In all of this, though, I continued to feel that truly connecting with, and understanding and speaking to our audience was more important than people knew or realized.
So what is resounding most now in these newly uncertain times? My recommendation is to focus on these words: Authenticity, Conversation, and Ownership.
- Authenticity: Consumers can spot inauthentic, tone-deaf or out-of-context marketing a mile away. So, be positive, supportive, and as in touch as possible with your audience’s interests and sensitivities.
- Conversation: Then, create meaningful and helpful conversations, so that you can guide and manage them. It’s far easier to guide conversations that you proactively enable, than ones that happen outside of your awareness. So, in other words, own your conversations.
- Ownership: Own your customer relationships and put in the effort to keep the conversations voluntarily within the bounds of your open and positive, but controlled, experience. For example, comments or reviews left elsewhere (e.g. Yelp, GlassDoor) as a result of a poor brand experience can actually cripple a business. Instead, consider how you might own, lead, and support audience conversation. Authentically.
What do you think?
What’s different now, about engaging an audience?
And what else has worked for you?
NOTE: This post was originally written for Vuukle – a powerful real-time engagement and analytics platform. It is reposted from the original post, “Why Audience Engagement Matters Now More Than Ever”.