Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
How To Get Your Audience to Engage with Your Content
Tired of putting out content and hearing crickets? You’re using calls to action, you’re asking questions, and yet no one ever responds. Your inbox is empty, your dms are empty, and it just feels like no one is paying attention.
The good news is that they probably ARE paying attention – you’re just not crafting your calls to action in a way that makes people interested in engaging. The other good news? All’s it takes are a few small tweaks to create content your audience will actually engage with, and I’m going to tell you how.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Really quickly, before we dive into this episode – I just HAVE to share something I’m really excited about with you. My book, Chasing Simple Marketing, is launching this July. I wrote this book for the business owner that stumbled into entrepreneurship because they were following their passion. But without that Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or background in business, they find marketing overwhelming and frustrating. Throughout these pages, I’m going to take you on a simplicity-focused journey to improve your content marketing and you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing, so that you can fit your marketing into your business, without it taking over your business. To learn more about how to grab your copy, and even potentially get on the launch team head over to amandawarfield.com/book/ See you there!
- This week’s episode is brought to you by the Chasing Simple Content Planner and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com/planner/
- This week’s action step: Choose just one of these to work on incorporating easier CTAs this month.
- This week’s book recommendation: Who is Maud Dixon by Alexandra Andrews
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
Did you love this episode?
Don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Also, if you would be willing to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it would mean the world to me. It’s such a small thing that can make a big difference in helping me spread this message of simplicity to other overwhelmed women.
Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
Tired of putting out content and hearing crickets. You’re using calls to action. You’re asking questions, and yet no one ever responds. Your inbox is empty, your dms are empty, and it just feels like no one is paying attention. The good news is that they probably are actually paying attention. You’re just not crafting your calls to action in a way that makes people interested in engaging.
The other good news. Alls it takes are a few small tweaks to create content your audience will actually engage with, and I’m going to tell you how. You’re listening to episode 175 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book Chase, simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield.com/book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, how do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head when you think of marketing. Welcome friend. This is Chasing Simple Where Practical Marketing Strategy Meets Simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker educator, and author of Chasing Simple Marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one-on-one clients, such as the Contract shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or how my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell reading in our hammock watching Gamecock Sports traveling or forcing our cats to snuggle me.
If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really wanna be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
Which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week, I’ll bring you transparent conversations, actionable steps and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is, and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips and advice on uncomplicating, your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Really quickly, before we dive into this episode, I just have to share something that I’m really excited about with you.
My book, Chaisng Simple Marketing, is launching this July. I wrote this book for the business owner that stumbled into entrepreneurship because they were following their passion, but without that Master’s of Business Administration or that background in business, well, they find marketing. Overwhelming and frustrating.
Throughout these pages, I’m going to take you on a simplicity focused journey to improve your content marketing, and you’ll walk away with an actionable plan to simplify your marketing so that you can fit your marketing into your business without it taking over your business. To learn more about how to grab your own copy and even potentially get on the launch team, head over to amanda warfield.com/book.
I’ll see you there. Wanna know the secret to getting your audience to actually engage with your content? It’s to make it as easy as possible. All too often when we create our calls to action, we create calls to action that are overly complicated and they seem simple. But when you sit down and think about it, the reality is, is that you’re asking too much of your audience.
So, for example, you ask a question and in your mind, A question is simple, just answer the question in the comments. Well, depending on how the question is asked or what the question is, it may require them to think, and if they have to think they’re not gonna answer because. It takes too much of their time and their mental capacity.
So what we wanna do is we wanna make sure that what we’re putting out is as easy as possible to follow by asking simple questions and giving simple commands. But we also wanna make sure that we’re not giving too many calls to action because that also can cause that analysis paralysis of, well, which do you want?
And what do you want from me? So when it comes to YouTube, for example, you want to make it as easy as possible to follow through. YouTube makes it easy because you can include links all over the place, which is really nice. You can include the link to other videos. You can pop up other videos within your video at the end of your YouTube video itself.
You can include the link to something that. Is outside of YouTube. You can include links in your description, all of these different things. So what you wanna do is you wanna decide what is your one call to action going to be. Maybe it’s to grab your freebie, but you wanna make sure you link to your freebie in the notes below, in the description.
You also wanna make sure that at the end of your video, that freebie link is there and that you’re sending people to that. But make it enticing, make it simple for them to know that they. Need it as well. Don’t just say, I have this freebie. Go download it. Instead say something like, if you want to x, I have what you need.
Here’s how you can get it. Give them a strong reason so that they know, oh yes, I do need that. If you just say, Hey, I’ve got this free training that’s gonna give you five ways to do this thing, they’re gonna go, but do I need it? Is it gonna help me? There’s all these silent questions that run through their mind, right?
Whereas if you say, if you want to achieve x. This is what you need. It’s gonna make it a lot easier for them to take that action step. The same is true for a podcast, but with a podcast it’s a lot harder because you, you can put links in your show notes, but when you think about how most people are listening to podcasts, they’re listening on the go.
And so you wanna make sure that if you are telling someone to go to a link, you’re making the link really easy to remember. You also, May want to consider that your call to action isn’t a link, or if it is that you’re gonna need to repeat it over and over and over again throughout multiple episodes, because they’re not going to most likely stop what they’re doing to look up a link real quick.
Every now and then people will, but for the most part, part, that’s not easy. It’s not simple, right? It’s, oh, I have to stop cleaning, or I have to pause. On my walk, or if they’re driving, they’re definitely not gonna be able to. So you have to think about that as far as, okay, a link may be difficult or it may be something that I realistically know that I need people to hear 7, 8, 10 times.
So I need to talk about it in all of these different episodes. Or what you can do with the podcast is have a simpler call to action, like head to. You’re a player and make sure you subscribe so that you get this episode so that you get my episodes every single week or every other week, however often they drop.
Or you could make it really simple as far as. Share this episode with a friend. Just click that little button, you know, make it as simple as possible so that they’re more likely to take action. In all transparency, a podcast is probably the type of long form content, or really content in general where you’re gonna get the least amount of engagement because it is.
Just the nature of how people listen to podcasts. You listen to it while you’re busy, you listen to it on the go, and so you’re most likely not gonna stop to take whatever call to action it is. So keep that in mind as well. It may be something that you should have to repeat over and over and over again throughout a series of episodes and recognize that you’re probably not gonna get a ton of engagement through a podcast.
If you have a blog, it’s really simple because you get to add links and you can add images that you make that when clicked, send people to a certain link. And so you can visually entice people. And you also, again, your phrasing is gonna be really important. And instead of, here’s this freebie, go download it.
You should say, if you want. This or to do this, to achieve this, this freebie will help you. This training will help you, whatever that would look like. But you could say it like that, and you also can add the addition of that visual graphic that you can stick in there. So that is a really easy way to gain engagement with a blog.
I would recommend linking two different blog posts that you have. Or, and because realistically for seo, you should be linking other blog posts throughout each blog, but your main call to action either being, go read this other blog post, or a way to get on your email list, potentially if the blog post is really, really specifically geared towards.
Say something in your shop or a service that you offer, link to that. But I wouldn’t ask people to leave comments. It’s not how people are using blogs these days, and alls it does is create work for you to have to moderate and then go respond and all of that. So I would recommend linking to another blog, a freebie, some way to get on your email list or a service or product that you have for your blog, and let that be the way that you get people to engage with it.
When it comes to emails, you want to make sure that you end every single email with a call to action again. When you’re linking to outside things, you wanna phrase it so that here’s what you wanna achieve, here’s how I can help you do it. But you also could just enter emails with a question and encourage your people to respond to you again, you wanna make sure that that question is so, so simple.
Give them a this or that type answer, or ask a simple yes or no question, and that’s gonna be more likely to get a response than. Tell me what your biggest struggle with this is. There are times and places where that question makes sense in your emails. Absolutely. I recommend that often for different types of emails, but for your general week to week email, just having a simple, have you already started doing this?
Yes or no, let me know. Type question or, Do you prefer this or do you prefer that, or do you want to start with this or start with that. Giving them a really easy way to just hit reply and send you a quick answer that they don’t have to think about. That’s gonna get you more email responses than a.
Open-ended, longer type question that they really have to sit there and think about. The same is true for your Instagram feed. Having those really, really simple questions in your feed is going to make it much more likely for people to engage on. One of my most ever engaged with post on Instagram, the call to action was, do you prefer hot coffee or iced coffee?
And I got more comments on that than I have ever gotten on. Any other post because it was really, really simple for people to say, oh, I prefer this one, or I prefer that. Now Instagram stories are going to be a little bit different. They’re gonna let you take it to the next level. So, Instagram has created all of these different stickers that you can use to help your people engage with you.
I really, really love using polls because it’s a simple this or that type answer, right? And they’re able to say which one they prefer, which one they think. It’s not something they have to think about. There are the question boxes, which are more open-ended. Those are great for recommendations when you’re asking someone for a recommendation.
They can be utilized in other ways, but you’re more likely to get engagement with a poll. Versus an open-ended question box unless you’re asking for recommendations. There are also these buttons that you can put an emoji and people can tap, or there’s a slider there. There are a bunch of different engagement type ones, but the two that I see get the most engagement currently are the polls and the question boxes, and you just want to be strategic about how you use them.
If you’re asking something open-ended, realize that it may not get as many responses. With the question box, but if you’re asking something open-ended, the question box is the way to go. If you’re asking something that can be poll formatted, I really recommend using the poll box. But if you’re looking for recommendations, which is a great way to get people to engage is ask what they think and what they use, incredible way to get engagement, and that would be a great spot for those question boxes as well.
And there you have it. Different ways that you can make it just a smidge easier and simpler for your audience to engage with your content. Those really tiny tweaks can go a long way towards boosting your engagement. And just one more thing that I wanted to say, particularly about engagement around social media right now, especially on Instagram, engagement is low and that can turn into a self-defeating.
Process where we aren’t getting engagement, and so we stop encouraging engagement. So I really wanna encourage you to think about that. Are you actually encouraging your audience to engage with your content or are you just putting content up and hoping they’ll engage? And there is a big difference there.
So your action step this week is to choose just. One of these to work on incorporating easier calls to action this month. So whether that’s your stories or your Instagram feed, or your emails or your blog, or your podcast or YouTube, what one place are you going to work on really tweaking and improving your calls to action so that they’re easier and simpler for your people to engage with so that they don’t have to think.
That is the whole goal is to make it so that they don’t have to do a lot of thinking. Now, this week’s book recommendation is who is Mod Dixon by Alexandra Andrews. And this is one of the twisties books I have ever read. So if you like surprises in your books and you like twists and never knowing what’s coming next.
This is when you’re definitely gonna wanna check out, and I will link to that in the show notes. All right, my friend. Until next time, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over@amandawarfield.com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never missed an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast and ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now. Go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
+ view comments . . .