Online Marketing Tips Video: Engaging Your Audience

By Li Evans

I know it'd Wednesday, but still working on fixing the kinks with my software.  Let me tell you, Adobe CS4 Premiere Pro is a memory hog!  More so than CS3 - big difference.  I wrestled with things till very late last night and decided to finish it up today. 

This week we've got 3 tips on how to Engage Your Audience.  Whether its your blog, your community or even MySpace or Facebook, these 3 tips if put into a social media strategy can help you interact, and engage the members of your audience and maybe even turn them into evangelists!

Full "Engaging Your Audience" Video Transcript After The Jump...

Engaging Your Audience Video Transcript

Hi and welcome back to Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing, I'm Li Evans of KeyRelevance and Search Marketing Gurus. This week for our Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing we're going to talk about how do you engage your audience. So how do you go about getting your audience to interact with you? And keep that going and looking at that. Its very important for any social media strategy that you actually get the people engaging in what you are trying to relate to them. So lets take a look at the first tip.

Your Audience's Opinion Matters

First on is "Ask Their Opinion". Whether its in a blog post where you say "hey can you give me your opinion", "can you comment on in the comments below and let me know what you are thinking", or it's either putting up a poll or asking them to submit maybe an email about their experience. You need to ask their opinion to understand what they're thinking about what you are presenting. That will start to get the interaction and the relationship building.

Let Your Audience Feel They Are Part of Something by Co-Creating

The second tip I have for you is to Co-Create. If you are a product, a brand or a company that builds products, a really great way to engage your audience, that captive audience that you already have is to co-create products. Whether its them actually submitting ideas for the naming or the marketing or what they would like to see in the next product that you are building or even giving their opinion on menu items, whether you want to see new menu items or not. You're asking their opinion, again, but you are actually asking them to help you build something. And then they've actually put some of themselves into building that product and helping you build that product. It gets them engaged in as your audience.

Give Back to Your Audience by Rewarding Them

The third and final tip for today is "Reward Them". I'm not talking about bribing them, I'm talking about rewarding them. Every now and then you give somebody a t-shirt, or your send them a free package of something you sell, or you send them a nice present. It shows a little goodwill, and again its not bribing, you want to reward them. It's like rewarding maybe even your entire audience, you give them 10% off of a product or something like that. That gets people engaged and it helps to show, again, goodwill and it builds relationships within your social media community you are working with. Those are the three tips I have for Engaging Your Audience in Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing. I'm Li Evans of Search Marketing Gurus and KeyRelevance. As always you can find a transcript of this video at SearchMarketingGurus.com. We'll see you next week with another Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing.

Comments

[Penny Haynes]

Great video! I found you through TweetLater, and have just followed you.

When I got the last update from Premiere Elements from 3 to 4, it was so glitchy, it just kept shutting down my computer. Very frustrating. Have CS3 now, but still not very impressed due to bugs.

Will retweet your video to my members and looking forward to seeing more from you.

[David Temple]

Great tips Miss Li. Too often people use social media like they use traditional advertising, a one way conversation. Getting your users engaged is simple as you pointed out with these tips but few are doing it well.

[Nick Stamoulis]

yeah getting your visitors to engage on your social platform is very important for credibility.

[Sam Cheater]

I have found that engaging or getting them to interact is a great form of selling things. The hard part is actually finding the time to do it. I know that myspace is a great example of engaging via multiple arenas.