5 New Ways to Engage Your Audience

Digital marketing changes fast. So fast, in fact, it can be hard to keep up with what your audience is doing.

What was cutting edge 6 months ago might now be old hat for the people you’re trying to reach.

We’ve put together this list of 5 cutting edge engagement techniques for connecting with your audience, whether you’re in the B2B or B2C space.

Snapchat

Traditionally used as a way for individuals to engage with their friends and followers, more and more businesses are now using Snapchat to communicate with their target audience. Snapchat enables a business to have a video-based conversation where both parties are actively engaged. A company using Snapchat can also view and reply individually to their audience.

360-Degree Photos/Videos

Content is consumed at an ever-increasing rate. No longer are the masses wanting to just read static information. They want to be shown it through visual media such as videos and photos. Photo Spheres present unprecedented interactivity using 360-degree photographs to show consumers an experience without actually having to be there. Similarly, 360-degree videos now offer the consumer a deeper insight into a product or experience by looking throughout the video’s ‘world’ in the comfort of their own home.

One of our client’s, a module home builder, recently put this sort of technology to use in virtual tours of their display homes, allowing customers hundreds of kilometres away to be able to walk through a modular home design as if they were there in person.

Facebook Live

The live streaming feature of Facebook is a potential game changer for businesses. The bottom line is that you’re providing ‘special’ insight into your company and what you’re selling. For example, if you’re releasing a new B2C product, you might live stream the product rollout event to your Facebook audience. A B2B example could be if you’re promoting a new product or a new idea in your company, you could live stream the ideation (thought process) process or even stream a sneak peek of the new product – effectively creating a ‘teaser trailer’ for your brand/product. Unlike other live streaming platforms such as Periscope, the videos you create on Facebook Live stay there forever (unless you remove them) so you can build up a library of videos to continue to engage your audience.

YouTube

YouTube is a perfect way to advertise your company through several variations of video such as How-Tos, Product Showcase (advertisements) and Education (About Us/Brand or Product Awareness). It enables you to create and upload your content to use as tools to make potential customers aware of your business, educate potential and existing customers, and put you into a trusted position when it comes to your customer’s decision stage of the buyer journey.

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality

2016 is billed as the year of Virtual Reality. While Augmented Reality has been used by companies for around a decade now, thanks to innovation and early adoption, virtual reality has become a forefront in the media world. Now more than ever, a business can showcase its products off in a space that a potential customer can access without leaving their living room. So too they can interact with products in the marketplace using augmented reality on their mobile devices. An example of this might be a real estate app that overlays landmarks on your phone’s camera when looking around the local landscape.

Taking it Further

So how can you take some of these ideas and implement them in your own business? Maybe you could experiment with some facebook live streaming, or create a Snapchat account and start participating. Or maybe you could simply log into that Youtube channel you haven’t touched for a year and upload a video of an expert in your business talking about one of your products or services.

By tapping into these emerging technologies you’ll be engaging your audience in ways your competitors have never considered.