When it comes to reaching your target audience, words on a page have never been enough. There have always been strategies designed to bring people in and make them feel involved, heard, and important. Since you’re no doubt planning your marketing strategies for 2024, let’s look at some ways you can interact with your audience.
Let’s Play a Game
Gamification of your marketing is an easy way to get people to engage with your brand, and do so publicly. Creating something like a contest has the added bonus of creating winners. Everyone wants to be a winner, and when people win, they want to talk about it! Consider creating a quiz relating to your industry that people can take online. You can reward them with things like demo sessions or swag and encourage them to share their scores across social media. Other people will see that and their natural impulse will be to beat that score and challenge others.
There’s also just your standard sweepstakes, which boils down to “in exchange for your information, you have a chance to be a winner”. Most social media contests require that people tag their mutuals and follow certain social media profiles. Some of the time, those people will unfollow once the contest ends, but more often than not, they’ll stay dialed in and wait for your next offering. In the meantime, they see all your marketing materials, and regardless of whether or not they unfollow your accounts, you still have the info that they provided, which means they can be included in future campaigns.
Survey Says…
If there’s one thing people love, it’s giving their opinion. Surveys and polls are incredibly simple devices you can use to boost engagement and deepen your brand recognition.
Surveys have a two-fold advantage. Prospects love the idea that they’ll be able to impact your business with their thoughts and opinions, so they’ll often take the time (provided that the survey isn’t too long). Engagement here is the goal, but it’s not the only thing you leave with. You also gain valuable feedback that can help shape your future strategies. Your prospects and partners are an amazing source when it comes to new ideas and future features.
Polls give much more vague data since the selections you can make are limited, but polls also tap into this human need people have to be right. People will answer a poll, and if they see their answer losing, they will share that poll with like-minded friends and colleagues. In that way, it’s okay to make your poll a little bit divisive because that will actually drive further engagement. You can then plan content around the results and explore why that divide is occurring, which is going to be inherently interesting to anyone who participated and anyone else who has an opinion on the matter. It’s all about knowing your industry and your audience.
