6 Tips to Engage Your Audience

By Matthew Collis

Matthew Collis reminds us of the universal tactics to keep in a communicator’s arsenal at any time.

Audience engagement has always been important and top of mind for professional communicators. It is more important than ever now, as COVID-19 continues to surge through our communities.

Effective audience engagement means developing and executing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) communications strategies and finding ways to create and deliver fresh, relevant, and compelling content on the right channels.

Knowing how, when, and where to communicate with your audiences is essential to engagement and achieving your communication goals. For example, digital has been an especially key channel during the pandemic, with Canadians’ engagement with digital communication channels having increased significantly, particularly with email, instant messengers, and social media sites.

Audiences today are overstimulated with a constant influx of communications and brand messaging and it’s our job as communicators to break through the clutter. In this article I’ll share some of my top tips for keeping your audiences engaged:

1. Leverage the power of storytelling 
   If told right, stories are engaging, easy to remember, and can be an effective way to make your communications captivating and break through the clutter. Good stories are timely, relevant, simple, focused, easy to understand, and have a point of view. And the stories shouldn’t be all about you – the goal is to strike an emotional chord with your audience and build a connection, so make your stories relatable.

2. Make it visual
   Visual communications can be instrumental in getting your audience to better understand and retain the information you’re communicating. 4.6 billion pieces of content are published every day, yet the average human attention span is only eight seconds. And visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text in the human brain, with 90 per cent of the information transmitted to the brain being visual. Moreover, when it comes to remembering key messages, images have the advantage over text. So be sure to leverage infographics, videos, and other visual tools in your communications.

3. Display empathy 
   Displaying empathy in your communications means showing that you know what your audience cares about, including their needs, challenges, and pain points, and then speaking directly to those things in your communications. Knowing your audience and showing empathy is crucial to connecting on an emotional level, which can elevate the impact of your communications.

4. Consider polls or quizzes
   When it comes to engagement, don’t forget about the interactive content. During the lockdown, people are bored and look online for things to engage with. Consider creating fun, interactive online polls or as a tactic to communicate key messages to your audience, help them retain information, and get valuable data as a result.

5. Focus on social and go live
   Research has indicated that daily time spent in apps on Android devices has increased during the pandemic, as well as consumer spending in both iOS and Android apps. Q1 2020 set a new record for in-app spending for a single quarter at $23.4 billion globally. Social media apps have also reported higher usage and engagement, which poses significant opportunities for organizations to reach and connect with audiences via social. In addition to making sure you’re publishing compelling content on social and interacting with your audience where possible, consider going live on Facebook or Instagram to reach and engage with people in an effective way. Both platforms have upgraded their video features during the pandemic and engagement levels can be quite high.

6. Answer questions
   Another means to engage with your audience is through online chat or live Q&A sessions – answering your audience’s top questions is a great tactic to foster engagement, get a pulse on what is top of mind for people right now, and build trust. For example, The New York Times launched an “Answers to Your Current Coronavirus Questions” webpage, where in addition to featuring top commonly asked questions and answers, it lets the user type in their own question that is answered in real time through machine learning. And all the questions that are asked are recorded and monitored, so if there is no answer available and others have asked it, the Times makes sure to address it in the future.

Engagement is an important element to communicating with your audience and it is even more important now as we live and work through the most unusual times in recent history. While there are many ways to successfully drive engagement, I hope you try some of the tips above and discover the ones that work best for you / your organization.