What is one creative tip for getting my audience to engage with my brand more frequently?
These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. YEC has also launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Show Some Personality
“Connect with your audience on a more human level. This can start with a strategy as simple as adding humor to some of your social media updates. Give your audience a look behind the scenes, introduce them to a few members of your team and/or provide value in the form of what you tested to increase engagement the most (ie. giveaways, entertainment, education, etc).”
Kage Spatz, Spacetwin
2. Reward Participation
“This technique is most effective on social media. Encourage followers to share their experiences with your business or product and then highlight certain responses. You can then reward the person with the highlighted response with some sort of discount or promotion. This helps change an audience’s frame of mind from passive viewers to active participants.”
Bryce Welker, CPA Exam Guy
3. Crowdsource
“Ask questions. Show your audience that you care about what they think. This is easily one of the most overlooked and most powerful engagement tools out there. Ask what they want to see, what they think of a color or new model, or service you’re rolling out. Or ask more generic questions, like how they feel about snow or the holidays, etc. Have interest in what they think.”
Scott Levy, Fuel Online
4. Focus on Interactive Content
“I’ve noticed that most people want to feel as though they are involved. They want to participate and this is why I create survey funnels that reward participation. No one wants to take a survey for the sake of wasting their time, so I ask one question at a time and I reward them randomly. This creates more of a mysterious process and it is more gratifying at the end.”
Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing
5. Send Text Messages With Valuable Information
“SMS marketing is a good way to get people’s attention because you can customize messages to their interests. You can alert people to special deals on products they’ve purchased in the past, tell them about new offers, create polls and surveys and more. People almost always read text messages, so it’s one of the most effective marketing tools.”
Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting
6. Share Relatable Content
“Odds are that your customers have many of the same interests that you do. The content you share shouldn’t feel like an ad. It should be strictly relatable, funny or engaging. If you’re not comfortable sharing your company posts on your own personal social media, it’s probably not worth sharing to begin with.”
Ali Mahvan, Sharebert
7. Offer Limited-Time Promotions and Exclusive Deals
“No matter what your brand is trying to sell or promote, exclusivity can go a long way. There is nothing like getting a coupon or access to a sale that you know others don’t have access to. Try this out with your email subscribers and social media followers. You might just be surprised at how great the results really are.”
8. Ask for Help
“People do respond positively to requests for help, and there are a lot of potential questions they can help with, i.e. help choosing what color to paint the office, help us by liking one of our designs for design awards, etc. The secret to making this work is making sure to say “thank you” after the help is provided.”
Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design
9. Send Personalized Responses
“Personalized responses are key. Your audience will appreciate the specific reply to their outreach and will remember you as as the engaged brand that they can turn to for their needs.”
Fritz Colcol, Iridium Clothing Co.
10. Cater to Your Audience Needs
“Informative content that connects with the audience’s needs and interests acts as a magnet. It pulls them to your brand again and again. It also helps demonstrate your expertise in your niche and create a loyal audience. By creating relevant, informative, well-researched content, you reach the people who are most likely to become customers, engage with you and promote your brand.”
Liam Martin, TimeDoctor.com, Staff.com
11. Use Facebook Live
“Facebook Live is a fantastic tool we use. Try running weekly or monthly Q&A sessions for your customers. I usually set a time in advance and do basic promotion the week of the event. A tactic I use to avoid the awkward five minutes when you start FB Live is to have a few questions ready to go. I get these questions from emails or other communications while my audience is joining the event.”
Krish Chopra, Nurse Practitioner Clinical Rotations
12. Engage Via Direct Messaging
“Use direct messages on social media, like Twitter and Instagram. Brand content is slowly disappearing from feeds or being limited due to ever-changing social media algorithms that emphasize the pay-for-play model, so if you don’t want to spend top dollar on ads, make it personal and reach out via a direct message and start a conversation to get the eyeballs on your brand.”
Matthew Capala, Alphametic
13. Create a Private Facebook Group
“Something that has helped us was creating a private Facebook group for our customers, where they share wins and best practices on how to use one of our products. It’s becoming quite the active community and a great way to engage customers with our brand more frequently.”
14. Use Web Browser Push Notifications
“Similar to email opt-in, users can opt into receiving web browser push notifications when you publish new content. This is simple way to get your audience re-engaging across the browsers they use most often.”
Jon Clark, Fuze SEO, LLC
15. Find Common Ground in the Present Day
“Try to find common ground in the present day. Observe the day’s holiday, historical moments or any other relevant news that your demographic would be interested in. Engage in a conversation around how the day corresponds back to your company’s mission statement.”
Logan Lenz, PartsMarket
