To be sure your content or stories are working to achieve your business goals, you need to add measures to track and evaluate your audience engagement. This way, you know what you need to improve in your business strategy.
For example, if you have a high bounce rate, but you know how to write an SEO or search engine rich article to get the viewers but not provide enough or the right value to them to keep them around. This will tell you that you need to understand what your target audience is searching for or actually needs.
The following are four strategies designed to help you build and keep track of your audience interactions and movements:
Keep Track of Your Metrics and Analytics
WordPress sites and most social media platforms provide analytical information for free that you need to take advantage of. The metrics that are important to take notice of to ensure your audience engagement is healthy includes:
- Average session duration – How long they stay around shows you have content or value they need.
- Bounce rate – A high bounce rate indicates they are not staying around to view your content.
- Number of returning visitors vs. new visitors – A vital factor to determine retention of your audience. Having a lot of return visitors is a positive sign that your content is engaging. A healthy number of new visitors compared to return ones is also important to compare to ensure you are still attracting new ones too.
- Number of shares or likes – This one is self-explanatory. High shares and likes to indicate you are providing the right materials.
Build an E-mail List
Just because your customer made a purchase or joined your Facebook group doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build an e-mail list. This is your second chance to show them that you are valuable enough for them to return.
Not only that, if they are willing to provide an e-mail, you likely have valuable content to offer them. Giving you a clear insight that your company objectives and strategies are working.
Always End with a Call-to-action
No matter what kind of content you have, you need to end with a call to action. Crafting good CTAS is one of the most important marketing strategies ensuring that you get what you want from your customers.
Never expect them to know what to do. Make it as clear and obvious as possible. If you want them to buy it, tell them to purchase it. If you want more viewers, ask them to watch and share the video. Studies have shown that calls-to-action increase conversion by nearly 121%.
Create Live Events
Get your audience together to start a conversation and enjoy each other’s companies through live corporate events. Use this time to ask important questions and conduct a survey or poll to get them more involved. Doing this ensures audience engagement and gives you the metrics you need to be sure you are successful right away.
In the end, if you want more audience engagement, you need to ask for it, push out valuable content to the right audience and continue to track and evaluate your progress. The biggest culprit to low audience engagement is interacting with the wrong audience to start with.
Over the next 60 days, we will be talking exclusively about becoming a better storyteller so you can work on increasing your audience engagement.
It’s a fact that the human brain is wired or attracted to stories. This is because stories are how the human brain learns, grows, and remembers things. Through stories, you can better remember important events and communicate or connect with your peers and audience. And, more importantly, through stories, you gain audience engagement and the action required to run a successful and sustainable business.
Let’s be honest, we know that you’re unlikely to follow us through the entire series, so here’s a little cheat for you – the entire series of articles as an ebook – our gift – no strings attached. If you’re ready to catch up on some summer reading that will actually propel your business forward then this is for you.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE E-BOOK: Become a Good Storyteller to Increase Audience Engagement
