7 Ways To Keep Your Audience Interested and Engaged
Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash
When I was in my early 20’s, I helped launch a brand geared towards empowering and inspiring people to get involved with local organizations in their neighborhoods.
Our goal was to hone in on the intersection of community service and culture. Volunteerism in an individualistically-driven culture is a tough sell, so we wanted to build a movement that was as equally inspiring as it was informational.
We wanted to touch people’s hearts and their hands.
I helped run this movement for three years, over which we saw 9,000+ people come out and get engaged with over 150 different organizations throughout our city. Together, we gave back over 32,000 hours of service to our city, which equated to somewhere north of $500,000 worth of impact.
I learned a lot over those years. There are so many important lessons that come up whenever you begin to pursue a new entrepreneurial venture. There were a lot of wins and just about as many losses. As anyone who has ever started anything knows, getting something off the ground isn’t necessarily the hard part. Keeping it moving is.
One of the core things I studied throughout this time is how to keep my audience engaged in my message and vision.
Without people, I knew that my dreams were just that — dreams. If you want to start anything new, I’d encourage you to spend some time thinking about how you keep your audience interested.
Over the course of my experiences, I’ve found seven ways or strategies that are often used to reel an audience back in.
You won’t be able to keep everyone engaged. That’s never the goal. The true goal of leading a new venture is to keep your core engaged. If you can do that, you can conquer whatever you’re trying to do.
1. Newness
This is the easiest and most common way to keep your audience engaged. As such, it is also the least effective in the long-term as newness is almost always a short-term solution to a bigger issue.
As we said above, it’s fairly easy to start something new. People like a novelty. They like “never-before-seen” and “once-in-a-lifetime.” This is why you’ll see company after company working to offer new ideas and opportunities for their audiences.
In my experience, newness comes in a few main formats. You can either offer new alternatives to old products or services, or you can offer new ideas.
In other words, you can offer spin or shine.
When you spin something, you are making a claim that you’ve added some variation with the hope of drawing the end-users focus back on your product. This is why department stores are constantly offering discounts and mark-downs. The product is the same but the method to keep you interested changes.
Or you can offer shine. You do this but coming out with something that is actually different from what you previously offered. It could be a new feature, a new product, or a new service, but if you have something that shines, you have something that will draw the attention of your audience.
But be warned, both spin and shine will only last you so long. The world is full of shiny things and nothing spins forever, so if you choose this route, you may see higher engagement up-front, but you’ll need more spin and shine in the near future to keep that engagement moving.
2. Involvement
For us, we often used involvement as our primary tool of keeping our audience engaged.
Involvement means that your audience is actively engaged in the service or product that you offer. It means that their participation should lead to further participation.
As people used our software to find local organizations to serve, they got involved. They heard the stories and met the people who had boots-on-the-ground. If positive, their participation helped hook their interest and led to more involvement.
Using involvement to try to keep your audience engaged can be tricky in two main ways.
People have limited time, so unless you can get involvement to stick deep down in their hearts and minds, it is likely to fade when something more urgent comes up.
Inspiring people towards involvement often means a more hands-off approach on your end. It requires more trust and less control.
Helping people get involved in your venture will create some good interest and traction, but it won’t last.
Think of it as a cast for a broken bone. You might have that structure around your arm for 6-8 weeks, but it’s not meant to be a permanent piece
3. Responsibility
Responsibility is the big sibling of involvement and is one of the most powerful ways I’ve seen to help keep your audience engaged and interested in your mission.
It’s one thing to be intrigued by a new opportunity or product. It is another step between intrigue and getting involved. Responsibility is one step beyond that.
If you can get someone to be responsible for some aspect of your venture, you have a very good chance at keeping them interested and engaged.
This is because people who have responsibility are owners and not just consumers.
We live in a fast-paced world that pushes us to consume, consume, consume. Because of this, we tend to view most opportunities in life through the lens of: “what can I get from this?”
However, when you feel the responsibility, you are more prone to disregard the consumption question and instead ask “what can I give to make this better?”
If you get someone asking that question, you know you’ve got them hooked.
4. Fun
I once heard a communicator say, “if they are laughing, you know they are listening.”
People are drawn to the fun. Like it or not, we live in a world of entertainment and fun sells.
Most entrepreneurs start off thinking that they want to engage people and present an opportunity that others will enjoy. Yet somewhere along the way, it’s easy to let the fun get derailed as the focus shifts to the logistics, data, analytics, finances, and or the dozen other necessary areas wound within your venture.
If you are looking for a way to re-connect with your audience and invite them into your story, try introducing a little fun into your service, marketing, or product.
A few months ago, I started a learning cohort at my company and after the first three months, I knew we needed to add in some fun to keep people engaged. So looking ahead, I plan on introducing some variety to our learning inputs, namely, watching a fun masterclass video on cooking or writing or scoring a movie.
It can be something small, but as long as it breaks up the cycle and regular rhythm of details and spreadsheets, it can help keep your audience interested.
5. Force
Sometimes you have more direct control over the audience for your venture. You might be the CEO or Managing Director, and as a result, you might have people who work under or for you.
In such cases, it is possible to use force to help get people interested. When I was helping lead this movement of city engagement, I built a team that ended up being around 65 people who all reported up to me.
I could have told them that if they wanted to keep working on this, they must be interested. Any leader can exert their influence and power to “force” their people to rally behind the vision.
But be warned, this way of stirring up interest is the most dangerous and often most ineffective.
Forcing people into fandom is rarely the solution for long-term growth. As an entrepreneur, you want enthusiasts, not forced converts.
I remember reading once that using force is like threatening to pull a gun. You can only really do it once or else it stops being effective.
You can use force to help keep people interested but I wouldn’t recommend it
6. Tradition
If you can create a tradition or symbol of longevity amongst your end-users, you suddenly have access to a passive-form of maintaining interest amongst your audience.
I’ve never forgotten the example of the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon and their use of tradition.
Running a marathon is hard work. That’s why few people do it. For those who do run marathons, part of the reason they do is the tradition of getting a medal at the end of every race they run. I’ve been to people’s houses where those medals were displayed as a proud memento to their commitment and passion.
The Indianapolis Monumental Marathon obviously partook in this tradition of giving out a medal at the end of the race. And yet, in 2018, they decided to slightly change things up.
In 2018, they gave out a medal to racers that, while complete, was meant to be a part of a 4-piece medallion. Think of it as a puzzle. If a runner completed the 2018 marathon, they got part 1 of the puzzle. If they ran again in 2019, they got another medal which was technically part 2.
After four years, they would have all four pieces, which connect to form a circle in the middle — the final token you received if you run all four marathons.
This idea of tradition led runners who would consider only running one marathon to re-up their commitment for the next year. It became a tradition people didn’t want to miss.
Using tradition can be a clever way to keep people interested.
7. Incentive
Lastly, using incentives helps keep people interested in your product or service.
We all learned this as early as kindergarten, where many of us were rewarded with gold stars whenever we followed instructions.
Incentive programs are meant to keep your audience interested by cluing in on a core reality of human beings — we like to achieve and accomplish.
The danger with adding an incentive to your service is that it’s fairly hard to find an incentive that the majority of people truly desire. Without a desire to achieve, people won’t be allured by your incentive.
You don’t want to over-offer, like with a new car. But at the same time, you don’t want to under offer by giving out a $25 gift card to your local Olive Garden.
It’s a fine line, but if you can strike it, incentives are a great way to keep people interested.
Quality keeps
At the end of the day, quality matters most. You will be hard-pressed to keep anyone engaged and interested in your vision if you don’t have the quality to back up your venture.
People may be drawn to shiny things. You may be able to make a quick buck or sell your way through the first months or even years.
But if you want to last, if you want to have devoted followers and a captured audience, you need quality. You need to offer something that tangibly fills a gap in people’s lives.
Then you need to continue to invest in both your product and your people so that day after day, you can look your audience in the eyes and say, “your investment is worth it.”