20 ways to engage your audience

Engaging your audience isn’t as easy as you think, it takes a well thought out content strategy.  Try to incorporate these 20 tips to engage your audience in your editorial calendar.

1. Ask questions – Make your readers provide input, get them thinking and once they do start talking, listen and respond

2. Solve a problem – take one of your products that will solve a problem and tell them about it.  If you don’t want to use one of your products, tell them about something else that you use/know that will solve a problem.  Most people search on the Internet for solutions to a problem.   How many times have you googled – how to get stains out of your clothes?

3. Offer a how to guide, white-paper, report.   When planning your content strategy, think about what resources you have that would be helpful for people to have and then offer that to them in exchange for an email address.

4. Run a contest – make sure that you have enough of a fan base when you pitch your contests, otherwise you will be having a contest for a handful of people which will not yield a good return.

5. Put a vote or poll on your post – if you want some information, put it on your site so that you can get input from your viewers very easy.

6. Subscribe option – give your readers a place so that if they find your content useful, they can subscribe and receive regular updates.

7.  Have a guest blogger on your site.   Often times this is a good way to infuse their audience to your page or vice -versa.

8. Lesson learned story –  A great story that incorporates something that people can learn from.

9. Use videos –  If you can incorporate a video on your site, this is a visual that will improve your audience engagement.  Videos help the search engine optimization for your site.   If you are putting them on a blog, host them on YouTube so that it does not slow down your website.

10.  Post an inspirational or motivational quote –  people love these and will share them when they run across one that seems to speak to them.

11.  Re-post, re-tweet or re-blog useful information that you obtain from listening to your customers.

12. Include important industry news that you think people will benefit from.  We all have our own industry material that we receive daily – sift through this and when there are items that would be helpful for your customers post them.

13. Include a call to action – if there is something that you want your readers to do – ask.  If you don’t ask – you wont receive.

14. Share a funny photo or video – these things tend to resonate well with the audience and tend to be shared like wildfire

15. Offer insider information or top secret info – when your followers think they are getting something that nobody else knows or has, you will capture their attention.

16.  Share your experience in a captivating way – you would be amazed at how a day in the life story will capture the attention of an audience.

17. Include links to other reference materials in your posts.   This makes it easy for your reader to stay on your page and review your material.

18.  Wide market appeal – as you are preparing your content, if you can keep your audience open, it will allow you to reach a broad market.   The more you focus in and drill down, the smaller your market audience will be.

19. Offer a freebie – sometimes if you have vendors that have promotional material or items, offer that to your audience.  You might be surprised that some will respond to this.

20.  Make sure you use social sharing buttons at the top of your post, this makes it easy for people to share your content.

Good luck and thanks for visiting The Sales Plan.  Be sure to subscribe to receive regular updates.