Alright, we have all been there. You have spent days if not hours writing your perfect content or developing that perfect product and you have just posted it or launched it online. You enter the waiting game now. Minutes feel like days and days feel like years before you get some likes. Then eventually it happens, you get one or a few likes (mainly from friends or family ) and in no time, the article is lost amongst the millions of posts that come every day.
Or you might get all the likes you want somehow but hardly any engagement. And in today’s world, a successful content or post is defined factors well beyond the number of likes. Yes, I’m talking about engagement.
So what are the Marketing tips to Drive Engagement for Bigger, Better Impact
In this post, I’ll talk about how to drive engagement for bigger better impact and eventually get successful conversions.
Tip 1 – Go big by Integrating Polls as part of your social media strategy
The first advanced tip to drive engagement amongst your audience is to have polls within your blog or post. You just have to have this within your social media strategy toolkit.
Right then, what do I mean by that? In a nutshell, a great way to build audience engagement to provide a platform for discussion and get your audience feedback. Nothing works better than a poll to do just that.
Polls Basics or 101
If you are big on social media, then on Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and many other popular networks, you would have seen many influential people often put up either an open ended question asking for opinion or a question with 3-4 options. Both work well, although the latter works better simply because your audience is mostly lazy to type in. You can custom choose a time window where you can set how long you want this poll to continue. You would want to choose at least 1 week though.
How do polls fare on engagement?
Oh boy! This is one of the best tools you can have to drive engagement up the wall. Every time someone votes or choose an option, the engagement score keeps ticking. And because most polls requires the audience to just choose an option, it doesn’t take much time for them as well. What’s more the engagement is purely organic and all marketing gurus tell you that that’s the best form of engagement. Based on statistics, polls typically generate more engagement than a normal post and therefore end up getting more impressions.
That’s hitting two birds in one stone. Wait there’s more, successful intriguing polls often get the audience attention and they will not only vote but also leave their thoughts behind. Now that three birds in one stone!
Lastly if you do it right, you might have just gotten a new follower for your brand. Dare I say it, that’s four birds in one stone (nothing against birds, I love them).
What kind of polls should I use?
This is the million dollar question right here. You can’t just put any random poll and expect to hit all four birds. Below are some of the pointers to keep in mind when designing a poll
Use polls to research your area of expertise.
- Ensure that it is thought provoking.
- Trending topics often get better engagement.
- Time your poll just right.
Alright Poll Pundits, wait a sec, you still need to define success.
There are many ways to measure the success of a poll and we spoke about them earlier. But I will list them again to make it easier for you.
- Number of engagement
- Number of Impressions
- Number of comments
- Number of reactions
- Thread forming polls are a success
So will you use polls in your next article or post?
Tip 2 – Amplify your Impact by Using Influencer Marketing as part of your Social media Strategy
We all have seen this for years and whether we know it or not, most of us are always somehow influenced by our favorite person. Be it sports, beauty, films or novels.
This is perhaps one of the top three social media tactics organizations use to ensure digital success. And you find influencers in every single field. Heck, you have influencers for influencers and influencers who think they influencers these day! They don’t come cheap though and typically costs the startup an arm and a leg.
There are various types of influencer marketing and I will simplify this for you in the next section.
Two major kinds of Influencer marketing:
1 – Product collaboration
Right, this is perhaps the most popular and organizations have been doing this for years with massive budgets. They pick a famous person and make them their brand ambassador and voila the brand awareness is off to the moon.
Why does this work?
Simply put, you like a famous personality for different reasons or characteristics or style and idea that they promote.
If the influencer promotes your brand by aligning with that special trait of the influencer that you have hit the jackpot. As the audience does not see anything different, rather they see their super star performing in a new act and they eventually want to be a part of it too!
2 – Niche Influencers
Let’s face it, not all of us are in the mass market. Some of us specialize in specific industries. This is where Niche influencer marketing comes in.
Basically, you can think of them as experts, icons or thought leader in their domain and they can align with your objectives and amplify your message to their audience as well. This is a win-win because if you pick the right niche influencer, that you have successfully scaled your audience and grown somewhere between 10-50 fold depending on how big the influencer’s audience is. But it’s not all about followers. There is a trickle effect in social media that can take off beyond your followers. That is the power of infinite shares. Simply put, your influencer shares his post to let’s say 1 million followers. Let’s say a hundred of them share to their 100K followers and the chain goes on. By the end of it, although your influencer has 1 millions followers, if done right you have reached to more than 5 million followers.
Don’t stop your influencer to just post. Amplify your investment and have them part of your PR plans as well. They could attend for an event, participate in a panel and one of the age old techniques is to get them to review your product as well.
Tip 3 – Explosive impact – Get Video testimonials as part of your Social media strategy
Ooh! This one is my favorite and its budget friendly as well. We all love to see and hear beyond the ad. In reality, we want to know if the product or service is really worth the money or not. Although for decades, written reviews work but with the advent of so many social video platforms, consumers find it easier to just pick a video and watch.
Make sure you reach out to your consumers and ask them talk about the product or service. This is a solid proof or purchase, it verifies the authenticity and more importantly give the new consumers a sense of comfort.
Don’t just stick to reviewing the product or service through the video testimonial. Get creative, ask them to talk about your brand, their experience of purchase, how the interaction was, etc.
Video testimonials have shown a great deal of impact when it comes to future sales or engagement.
Right then, what are the must-haves in the video testimonial
There are plenty of things you could do in addition to what I have written above, but let’s summarize the most important.
- Make sure the video is authentic with real consumers
- Guide the consumer what to talk about and ensure that you cover your core messages
- Compelling stories always work when it comes talking about an experience
- Ask the consumer to talk about how they benefitted from the product of service
- Make sure the picture quality is perfect, clear audio, good background and sufficient lighting.
- Keep the content simple, concise and DO NOT script it. The more spontaneous it is, the better. We all hate scripted testimonials.
- Edit the video for better flow and complement it with text and image where applicable.
Bottom line by Amintalks.com
If you want to create better, bigger impact then I’ve just given you the cheat code that can not only boost your audience engagement but also eventually build your brand positively. Influencer marketing, video testimonials and audience polls are sure to work for anyone and works well even for startups.
Leave your comments below.
