Audience Engagement: Meet 'em Where They Are

For more than a decade straight, almost every week brings some version of the familiar question I faced again this morning:

"Why didn’t my [insert speaker’s favorite post/channel/campaign] get more Likes, and how soon can you 'fix' it?"

This question prevails for a simple, sad reason — lack of focus on your audience.

For every viral upstart 'crushing it' with no path to monetize engagement, there’s a Director or Senior Manager blessed with the task of marketing an 11-figure, household-name brand, but lacking any functional concept of an audience beyond their own faces in the mirror.

Bigger-picture than the long-faded relevance of Likes & vanity metrics, the answer to this question hides in plain sight.

Sell 'em What They Want; Give 'em What They Need

Much of today's marketing knowledge base is legitimately complex: Global-market Data Science or the intricacies of multinational Performance Marketing, for example.

Yet the bottom line for consumer insights and audience engagement in an age of increasing digital clutter is genuinely simple:

• We vote with our feet.
• We vote with our dollars.
• We vote with our engagement. 

A Perfect Storm: Fragmentation, Resistance & Indifference

As the engagement equation becomes increasingly clear-cut, the challenges facing today's marketers exponentially intensify. In plain terms, second- & third-screen saturation puts you in a position of addressing an audience with their backs turned.

I won’t bog you down with the depth of my grad school research here, but long story short, this is what your brand content is up against: 

• Increasing resistance to commercial & institutional messaging.
• Jaded audiences with mindsets of, What’s the catch?
• Saturation in an overwhelming torrent of messaging clutter.

Resulting patterns of engagement add up to a perfect storm of audience fragmentation, resistance, and indifference.

So, why didn’t your [insert favorite post/channel/campaign] drive the results you were after?

It's likely you overlooked what your audience wanted in the first place:

• Does your creative process start & end with the outcomes you want, or with best practices, sound process, and what your audience actually wants?
• Are you that person who starts every editorial meeting, client call, and networking touchbase skipping discovery process and crowing at brand creatives for whatever your ego pre-rationalized?

Meet 'em Where They Are

More often than not, the more successful approach is to start with audience-focused questions aimed at giving people what they want — Operative term: They.

Through consumer insights, engagement metrics & gap analysis, stop telling and start asking:

1. Who is the audience for this messaging?
2. Where do they engage with our brand?
3. What do they (not you) want from this content?
4. What's in it for them?

Maintain this mindset, not just in Meeting 1, but throughout content creation, delivery, and measurement. You're bound to see stronger results and develop actionable understanding toward scalable, sustainable engagement. 

Charles Dye has written for and worked in brand creative & content strategy with Nike, Oracle, Livestrong.com, AZCentral Fitness, and newsrooms across the US. Commercial & non-profit inquiries welcome - [email protected]