Building up your brand awareness online requires you to have a presence on your blog, your social media channels, and anywhere else your customers can be found. Once you’ve put your brand out there, the next step is to create engagement opportunities with your customers.
This is far easier said than done, but with the right strategies in place, you can give people great reasons to engage with your content, wherever it may be.
3 WAYS TO INCREASE ENGAGEMENT WITH YOUR BRAND
Standard practices for engagement usually include asking for comments, giving your audience something to talk about, and so on. We’re going to discuss a few strategies that go beyond the basics and really position your brand as one to watch and engage with.
1. Tell Great Stories
Stories are an incredible part of our society, and they’re also a powerful way to get someone’s attention. In a time where our attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s, you need a good hook to grab people and keep them with engaged with your content.
The answer lies in stories. The kind of stories that show (and tell) your audience what your brand can mean to them. I’m talking about great tales with a main character that customers can root for and understand. These stories should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. More than that, they should have a great hook that makes a customer stop on your site, or on social, and engage with your content.
Focus on the human side of things. Say, for example, you’re telling a story about james from top10-websitehosting. You can talk about how he started working for the company, what unique things he brings to the company, and what he does for the customers.
2. Run a Sweepstakes or Contest
Our second strategy is one that involves getting people excited about your brand through things like sweepstakes, contests, or marketing campaigns. Check out user-friendly tools like Votigo that help you create a variety of different promotions without the need for complex coding.
A great example is running contests on Facebook. You can create all kinds of different campaigns and offer prizes for the winner/winners in order to incentivize customer participation.
Let’s say you’re a t-shirt company and you want more engagement in the form of likes. You can hold a sweepstakes where you send out t-shirts to lucky winners who entered to win and also ask that people like your page in order to access the promotion. Another option would be to hold a contest where people can submit their designs. The person who wins will get a cash prize and a free t-shirt with their design on it. Just like that, you also have a new design to sell!
3. Host a Live Stream or Webinar
Live streaming has become huge in today’s online world. With giant brands like Facebook introducing live services, brands can more easily access the tools they need to host live events or even webinars. For B2B companies, webinars can be great for engagement as they promise valuable information that other businesses will want to obtain.
For B2C companies, a live stream can offer incredible amounts of engagement. Other brands have already found the success they wanted from live streaming. BuzzFeed, for example, streamed themselves putting rubber bands on a watermelon until it exploded. Silly, yes, but it earned them 807,000 views during its peak, and 315,000 comments!
Live streams are popular and exciting, so look for a way to create live event that your customers would enjoy. Even something as simple as a behind-the-scenes look at your business could work.
Final Thoughts
Brand engagement is the goal of all online businesses. These strategies will help you better understand how you can pique the interest of your customers and convince them to join up with your brand and your content. How do you increase brand engagement? Let us know in the comments!
This article was originally written by Trey Donaldson for the Heyo blog.
