Audience engagement is essential for the success of your business, and one of the ways you can boost engagement is through PR. In this article, we discuss what audience engagement means and some PR tips to increase it regardless of your industry.
What is Audience Engagement?
In PR, audience engagement means getting your existing and prospective customers to interact positively with your brand, as engaged audiences are likely to drive sales and increase your revenue. It refers to the degree of customer involvement and loyalty to your brand. Note that engagement is often a result of the cognitive and emotional experiences people have with your brand.
Audience engagement is often measured through activities such as social media shares, comments, and likes. You can also track your website’s engagement through organic traffic, retention rate, and number of clicks.
7 Tips to Drive Audience Engagement Through PR Campaigns
If you are working on a PR campaign, driving engagement should be one of your primary goals. Here are some PR tips for driving audience engagement.
1. Develop a Memorable and Consistent Brand Voice
Your brand voice can influence how your audience interacts with you, so it’s essential to develop a voice that people will find memorable. Also, the right brand voice will humanize your brand and compel your audience to engage more with you. It may take time to nail a strong brand voice, but creating audience personas can help you determine what’s most relevant to them. Unlike tone of voice, your brand voice must be consistent, and customers must be able to identify you through it.
2. Create Positive, Educational, and Engaging Content
Content is helpful for many reasons, and if implemented effectively, it could drive up to 55% more traffic to your website. Also, PR campaigns and content that people find relatable will get more engagement and spark more conversation. Therefore, ensure that your content educates your audience, provides solutions to their problems, and positions you as a thought leader.
What’s more, a study by Berger and Milkman found that articles are more likely to go viral if they evoke a positive emotion. So, make sure to consider this in your PR strategy when creating content to help increase engagement.
3. Incorporate Visuals to Increase Shares and Engagement
Content with visuals, such as pictures, videos, and infographics, is more engaging than campaigns with text alone. For example, visual content like infographics usually gets 40x more shares than other forms of content, while marketers employing video content experience a 49% faster revenue growth than those who don’t. Also, be very creative with the content you share on social media. For instance, you can leverage engaging features, including stories, polls, stickers, live videos, polls, reels, and questions and answers to boost audience engagement.
4. Collaborate with Influencers and Brand Ambassadors
Many influencers have a large following on social media, and one of the ways to boost your audience engagement through PR is by getting them to say positive things about your brand. In fact, 92% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is effective. You can partner with an influencer in multiple ways, including promoting your social media page, reviewing your product, or recommending your brand. Your audience will be excited to engage with your brand if they see that you are associated with an influencer they like.
5. Initiate and Maintain Conversations with Your Audience
If you want your audience to engage, you must create content that asks them to do so. Also, ensure you don’t confuse readers by using multiple call-to-actions (CTAs). According to a report, emails with a single CTA increased clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%. When you upload videos and pictures on social media, ask your audience open-ended questions to elicit responses. Also, engage your customers by holding games, contests, and quizzes. Moreover, it’s recommended to chat and reply to your customers when they drop comments or engage with you. Use PR tactics like social listening to keep track of when customers mention your brand so you can respond.
6. Encourage and Share User-Generated Content (UGC)
Word-of-mouth marketing, on average, contributes to $6 trillion in global spending annually and accounts for 13% of total sales. User-generated content (UGC) is a form of word-of-mouth marketing that involves resharing content your audience created about your brand. This will increase the number of people that engage with your content and encourage other customers to share images featuring your brand. You can increase the UGC you receive by telling customers to share pictures with your products or creating a branded hashtag they can use when they upload images featuring your brand.
7. Monitor and Optimize Engagement Metrics
The basic engagement metrics on social media are likes, shares, comments, and views. Your website’s engagement metrics include unique visitors, average visit duration, and bounce rate. Always monitor these metrics to understand your engagement level better and identify PR strategies you can implement to improve. However, be mindful of vanity metrics; only prioritize metrics that align with your PR campaign objectives.
Get Help Increasing Audience Engagement Through PR
Running PR campaigns requires a lot of effort, and it may be difficult to handle if you do not have much experience. We at RPR firm have the experience, expertise, and strategies to drive PR campaigns that will boost audience engagement and sales.
Looking to drive audience engagement, increase brand awareness, or boost your reputation? Then schedule a consultation with us today and let our experts at RPR handle your PR campaigns for you.