Encouraging engagement, of some type, is what every marketing campaign is ultimately about. Unfortunately, many campaigns miss the mark by forgetting that the message should be less about the information of your features, and more about the emotional relevance and benefit of your widget or service to your target audience.
As such, when you are writing to your audience — e.g. a prospect or someone who is higher up the food chain and who is extremely busy — it is important to engage with your best storyline.
This can easily be done with a simple exercise and if you are reading this, you are in luck; sign up here for an online complimentary mini-coaching session on copy-boarding. This is for new clients only and is about 1-hour in length.
That said, it is often a challenge to develop what you want to say without is sounding like a cold-form-letter.
Encouraging Engagement Like A Professional
Tim Ferriss (the number one business podcaster) shared this simple template in an interview:
1st paragraph: “I know you are very busy and get a lot of emails so this will only take 60 seconds.”
2nd paragraph: 1 or 2 sentences about who you are and how that’s relevant to the person you’re contacting.
3rd paragraph: 1 or 2 sentences with a specific question the recipient can answer quickly.
4th paragraph: “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply. Even a 1-to-2-line response will make my day.”
Encouraging Engagement Old-School Style
Note this could also work if you picked up the phone and called. This seems to be a dying art as many would rather sens an email or text message.
I believe it is because people like to think things through before they speak. Additionally, they like to hear from other thinkers. Certainly, they want other people to know what they think, but doing that via a call can be scary for some.
So off to the email engagement campaign, and HubSpot’s Barry Feldman suggests “prompting your audience with one of the following ‘What do you think?’ strategies:
- Probe their personality. Post a question that invites people to share their opinion or weigh in on something.
- Play the “test your knowledge” game. It’s irresistible.
- Post a poll. It’s easy to create polls on Twitter and Facebook. In addition to engaging your followers, you stand to learn meaningful things about them too.
- Respond to my email. Email from brands are bound to ask you to click-through to read, watch, and try or buy something, but how often do they simply ask you to write back? I find this be an enormously engaging strategy and have seen it work for my brand and many others. Notice I wrote, “Respond to my email,” not “our email” or “this email.” A human-to-human first-person approach will be the engaging way to call this play.
- Just ask. Interactivity 101: simply post a question. Whether done so in a social stream, blog post, online group or community, or on a Q&A site such as Quora, I’ve witnessed asking followers relevant, provocative, and timely questions create some of the most engaging and thought-provoking social media activity of all.
Learn how to write more compelling content with a personal copywriting and copy-boarding session, or contact me directly for a chat.
Lastly, I wanted to point out that many confuse their online-messaging with online-postulation. In other words, many try to tell their social-media/advert/website/email reader gobs of info believing that they are passing along the important information; forgetting that a conversation should be a natural two-way engagement.
