Get the ultimate guide to audience engagement so you can lift revenue faster
Audience Engagement
March 27, 2023
In a world filled with streaming services, email, and social media, audience engagement is vital to achieving your growth goals. Without solid engagement, your audience isn’t going to pay attention to your content. A distracted audience member is less likely to buy, refer and share.
Audience engagement drives revenue growth in several ways, depending on your business. Here are three ways audience engagement can drive higher revenue for your company.
In publishing, more time on your website means greater opportunities to earn advertising revenue. A highly engaged audience member will stay on your website for minutes at a time and keep coming back. That depth and frequency of interaction mean you can keep earning more advertising revenue.
When someone comes across your website for the first time, they may need more time to be ready to buy. Earning permission to stay in touch with a passing website visitor through email or other means is vital. Visitors will repeatedly return when your website becomes a hub of valuable content and community experiences. This repeated engagement means you have more opportunities to present sales, new products, and other conversion opportunities.
B2B sales take considerable time and trust. Offering an engaging online experience is one way to demonstrate your expertise and trustworthiness. Your website can offer informative webinars about industry trends to prospects. Regularly offered premium content opens the door to sales opportunities.
As you start building your audience engagement program, it’s important to periodically stop and assess your efforts. Fundamentally, there are two dimensions to assess the success of your audience engagement: quantity and quality.
Even if you have a smaller niche audience, it is vital to keep growing the size of your audience. Specifically, focus on the audience measures you directly control, such as your website and email audience. Use the following metrics to track the size of your audience growth:
What about your social media followers? While social traffic is helpful, it should not be the focus of your audience building efforts. Social media platforms have a habit of changing the rules and making it harder to reach your audience over time. Also, a social media follower doesn’t have the option to share first-party data with you, which makes it much harder to follow up with them.
A large audience who doesn’t care about your brand or content doesn’t do you any favors. That’s why keeping an eye on the quality of audience engagement is vital. Use the following metrics to maintain high quality.
Now that you have your audience engagement measurement systems in place, what’s next? You’ve probably found that your engagement has room to grow. Use the following tips to grow your engagement even further.
Arena has resources and solutions that make it easier to grow audience engagement. You can install Arena software on your website in minutes. After you have it installed, use these tips to keep audience engagement growing.
One word of caution - it’s wise to start small. Building an engaged audience takes time. It’s better to execute a few strategies well than overwhelm your audience.
Improving your results starts with ensuring your efforts are headed in the right direction by planning. Put these tips into action to create memorable online experiences that your audience can’t stop talking about!
There’s no need to start with a blank page when it comes to audience engagement. Review your social media accounts, website analytics, email platform, and other tools to see which content already draws the most engagement (e.g. highest pageviews, highest average time on site, etc.)
Once you have that list of high-performing content, brainstorm variations with your team. Let’s take a sports brand for example. You found that your in-depth review guides for shoes consistently perform well. Look at other related products that you could review for your audience. This could be as simple as taking an older guide - anything older than 12 months - and updating it for today’s environment.
Once you find a few proven content ideas that your audience already likes, plan a live experience with Arena Live Chat.
Breaking news events are a proven way to draw people to your website, especially for publishers. In some cases, it’s possible to anticipate these events! That makes it far easier to use Arena Live Blog to offer an engaging experience to your audience.
To identify potential breaking news opportunities, look at highly anticipated scheduled events. For example, a technology publisher might see that Google and Apple have their annual conferences coming up soon. Those events often include exciting new product announcements and other news.
Once you find a potential event, start planning your live blog coverage. Offering regular updates (e.g. hourly) is a powerful way to draw people back to your website repeatedly as the news event unfolds. By preparing some evergreen content in advance (e.g. explainers and Q&A with influential people)), you can ease the pressure on your team.
Audience engagement efforts usually involve the same set of people at a company. For a publisher, it will be a combination of reporters, on air personalities and freelancers. For brands, your marketing team will likely do much of the heavy lifting. Those contributors will form the core of your audience engagement team.
However, variety and fresh perspectives are critically important for audience engagement. That’s why it is helpful to recruit other people in the company to make occasional appearances. For example, you might involve your product team to speak about new features when you have something especially exciting to offer.
By diversifying the number of employees with audience engagement experience, you’ll have a more resilient team in the future.
Growing your network of influencers is another way to enrich your audience engagement experiences. Influencers vary in terms of their audience size, compensation expectations and skills so take some time to reach out to a variety of people. Inviting a special influencer guest to appear in an online event is one of the best ways to make your online experiences more appealing for your audience.
You’ve planned a great event and now it’s time to shine! Use Arena Live Chat to run your event more smoothly.
When running a large event, planning for the unexpected is wise. Disruptive behavior, foul language or even off topic comments are all likely to occur. With Arena Live Chat, you have manual and automated moderation features to keep the discussion brand-safe and focused.
Knowing if you're connecting can be tricky when you run a digital event to engage your audience. A few well chosen poll questions in your event are a perfect solution. For instance, you can ask which topic the audience is most interested near the start of the event. Then, based on that feedback, you can adjust the focus of the event to meet your audience’s interests.
An engaged audience that pays attention to you is wonderful, but you may need more than that to reach your goals. You may have a goal to drive up paid subscribers. Use Arena conversion cards to highlight your promotion and track responses. Using a few conversion cards in your event is one of the best ways to ensure that audience engagement contributes to your goals.
It takes a lot of effort to keep growing audience engagement long-term. You need a steady stream of exciting content, interesting contributors, and a team to execute. Fortunately, one part of the puzzle is easy: getting the technology in place. Find out how to use Arena to build your online community right on your website.
