Too many brands and content creators focus on driving audience growth and lose sight of maintaining engagement. 

Capturing attention is one thing, but retaining attention and building engagement are greater challenges. Ultimately, it costs more to acquire a customer than to keep one. 

Let’s examine proven strategies and techniques for boosting audience engagement and exploring methods for building a community around your brand.  

Ensure a quality customer experience

First and foremost, we must ensure that customers have a quality experience from the start.

This is founded on building trust early, then reinforced through exceptional customer service and a seamless onboarding process. 

Next, ensure you are checking in on customers outside of billing cycles. Gather feedback and resolve issues quickly.

This commitment to a seamless and superior customer experience is the foundation of boosting engagement and retaining customers. 

Personalized approach to rewarding customers

Once a customer is acquired, it’s essential to understand and quantify that customer’s lifetime value. This can then be used to reward customers and build relationships based on segmentation. 

Dividing an audience into distinct groups allows a business to tailor content, incentives and products and services that best suit their needs, interests and behaviors. 

Implementing reward systems

We all love to earn badges and get that gold star. 

Gamification is a powerful tool to boost audience engagement to increase your audience’s time and effort investment.

Playing on our need for achievement, earning badges, points, stickers or even monetary bonuses can drive engagement. 

• Earn badges: The navigation app Waze creates a hierarchy of users based on points.
• Earn points for purchases: Starbucks’ app rewards customers with points for purchases, which can later be redeemed for products. 
• Advocacy and referral bonuses: Create compelling referral bonuses for customers to.
• Access exclusive content: Access exclusive content, giveaways, discounts or coupons.

Creating challenges and competitions

Challenges and competitions add an element of excitement and friendly rivalry to user experiences. 

Think Peloton’s leaderboard or even Duolingo’s language learning challenges. These challenges and competitions create a sense of competition and community.

Using progress tracking

Use progress bars to motivate your audience to stay engaged. 

An example is LinkedIn’s profile strength indicator or their new weekly sharing tracker. The weekly sharing tracker motivates users to post, comment and contribute to articles.

These gamification techniques can improve audience engagement and foster loyalty. Also, just because you don’t have an app doesn’t mean you can’t implement a gamification element. 

These could be earning badges as users in an online community, a loyalty program where you earn points or discounts or earn rewards based on desired behaviors, such as the All-State Safe Driver Discount. 

Interactive content strategies

Live polls and surveys

These are powerful tools to boost audience engagement. They appeal to the innate human desire to communicate and connect, turning passive viewers into active participants. 

Live polls can drive immediate interaction and have been shown to increase engagements by up to 40% compared to traditional surveys.

Polls are also great resources for engaging content. 

• Create an editorial calendar of polls to engage your audience.
• Use interactive elements in video conferencing or virtual event platforms.
• Keep polls clear, concise and relevant to the audience’s interests.

Quizzes and contests

Quizzes and contests are excellent tools to captivate audiences and reinforce learning. 

They serve as powerful lead magnets but also to increase engagement and opportunities for existing customers. 

Up to 91% of posts received more than 1,000 comments were Instagram contests, per a Tailwind study. Additionally, contests held with partners generated 79% more engagement than solo contests. 

Contests can also be a good opportunity to increase user-generated content (UGC) and help boost SEO. 

Dig deeper: 5 behavioral strategies to make your content more engaging

Building a community around your brand

Building a brand community is a powerful strategy for fostering loyalty, reducing marketing costs and generating innovative ideas directly from customers. 

A brand community goes beyond customers who simply purchase its products to communities of fans who interact and share experiences that increase their affinity for the brand.

Creating online communities

Online forums provide an excellent platform for larger communities to discuss shared interests related to the brand.

For instance, Spotify’s community forum allows users to talk about music they love, share new artists and discuss playlists centered around their music streaming platform.

Communities and forums can also improve your search engine results, as users often seek content from these discussion boards.

Dig deeper: SEO for user activation, retention and community

Hosting virtual events

Virtual events and webinars have become a trusted way for creators and brands to connect with members, share content and build a strong, resilient community.

These events offer several advantages:

• Reduced costs compared to in-person events.
• Greater flexibility for attendees.
• Improved accessibility for all participants.

Popular virtual event formats include webinars, summits, conferences and product launches.

For example, some brands host quarterly social events for entrepreneurs and founders to connect and learn from each other, extending the impact through content capture.

Encouraging user discussions

Brands can encourage user discussions by:

• Responding promptly to questions and creating discussion posts.
• Using social media platforms to interact with the community.
• Creating exclusive groups on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn.

With these strategies, brands can create vibrant communities that drive loyalty, advocacy and long-term success.

Using video for engagement

Video is an incredibly powerful medium for human connection. 

Videos can be used throughout the customer lifecycle, from serving as longtail awareness to tutorials and education to driving loyalty.

To get started, understand your audience and create different variations of your content. Then, measure audience engagement, learn and iterate.

From attention to retention: Proven ways to boost audience engagement

Remember, engagement is an ongoing effort that requires creativity, consistency and a deep understanding of your audience’s needs and behaviors. 

When done right, these efforts will lead to sustained growth, stronger customer relationships and long-term success for your brand. 

Customer retention and engagement are not one-time events but continuous journeys that require intentional and consistent care and nurturing of your customers.