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Looking for better ways to interact with your audience and maximise fan engagement? Look no further than audience participation tools! Find out why your business should be using them here.
Whether you’re a live content producer looking to involve your audience in your stream; you’re a brand looking to spread your message and gain invaluable first-party data; you’re a sports club looking to feature fan opinions and grow your broadcast, or anyone else with an audience, properly integrated audience engagement platforms are a must.
Businesses across the world are making use of advanced tools to gather opinions, increase their reach, and boost sales, but how exactly do audience interaction tools help you to achieve this?
To answer this question, we sat down with our audience interaction experts at Dizplai in order to get all the answers to your burning questions. Let’s get started!
What Are Audience Participation Tools?
Audience participation tools are pieces of software used by presenters, hosts, content creators, and brands to engage with their audience using surveys, apps, polls, competitions, and more. They allow you to interact directly with, and feature real-time input from, your audience.
These tools are becoming an essential part of any live content environment, allowing you to create a truly immersive experience that helps to drive consumers towards your desired actions.
By implementing an audience engagement platform into your process, you’ll enjoy a myriad of business benefits, including:
1. Increase Your Organic Reach (Tune-In)
Many audience participation tools use social media as an outreach medium. This means that if your audience interacts with your social media tool, their friends/followers may also be exposed to your content, organically increasing your reach. This is known as tune-in; as more people see posts about your content/brand, more people want to get involved. This creates a snowball effect: interactions equal greater reach, which results in more interactions and more reach!
2. Drive Fan Engagement
Audience engagement is all about making each individual feel acknowledged. An engaged audience is one that is far more likely to take your desired action, as someone who has directly interacted with your brand enjoys instant gratification for doing so (be that being entered into a competition, taking part in a poll, etc.). These consumers will be far more likely to want to buy your products, subscribe to your content, or share your service with their friends.
3. Gather Valuable First-Party Data
Every business needs data, and audience interaction tools are superb at gathering it. It’s a seriously low commitment option that people are far more likely to take. People regularly create accounts in order to engage with content they enjoy. In addition to this, the opinions they share can prove invaluable for businesses of all kinds, allowing you to:
- Improve your targeting – Learning about what your customer likes/dislikes will help to ensure you’re targeting the right people.
- Refine your messaging – Your messaging may not be targeting key pain points/consumer needs.
- Source feedback – This is an excellent way to organically source feedback on your service, content, or product.
- Adapt to changing consumer habits – Interacting with your audience allows you to adapt to your customers’ changing needs.
4. Activate Your Audience Through the Sales Funnel
We call this ‘activating your audience’, as you can include relevant calls to action directly in your content in the form of QR codes, links, and more. Interaction tools allow you to keep the focus on your content and your interactions with your audience, all the while gently encouraging the most engaged individuals to move through your sales funnel.
5. Build Brand Loyalty
If you’re providing a fantastic audience experience through your content, brand messaging, or advertisements, people will remember it. Consumers will recall the great experience they had interacting with your brand and will often return for more, building long-term loyalty.
6. Save Time on Data Collection
Sourcing data and feedback is a laborious process. Using audience interaction tools can expedite this, as many people will be happier to submit their data if there’s an immediate return in the form of interaction, such as seeing their comment on screen.
7. Global Accessibility
As tools are browser-based, you can easily access them from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a compatible device and an internet connection. This means you can host fantastic live content no matter where you are, and you don’t require any specialised equipment.
8. Cost-Effective Platform
Before audience engagement platforms, you’d need serious heavy-duty hardware to properly integrate your audience into your content. This is no longer the case. Save money by doing everything from your laptop or computer—easy, efficient, and far cheaper than the alternative!
9. Bring Your Content to Life with UGC
Adding the extra dimension of audience interaction truly enhances any content. Not only this, but many modern consumers expect a level of interaction—people want to engage, and want to be heard. Producing two-dimensional content simply isn’t enough anymore; you need specialised audience interaction tools to provide the full viewing experience that many have come to expect using user-generated content (UGC).
How do audience interaction tools work?
An audience interaction tool, as the name suggests, provides you with various (fully customisable) ways in which you can include your audience in your live content, including:
- Carousels – Feature a consistent flow of moderated social data, encouraging people to join the conversation on social media (see how ITV’s Martin Lewis Money Show does this by clicking here).
- Polling & voting – Provide your audience with the opportunity to measure their opinions against others’.
- Competitions & gamification – Social media competitions, contests, quizzes, or giveaways are fantastic ways to supercharge your audience interaction.
- QR codes – Continue the conversation on a platform of your choice by featuring QR codes on your content, ads, and more.
The possibilities of audience interaction tools are truly endless—if there’s something you want to try, you can rest assured that our team at Dizplai can help you to achieve it.
It’s our mission to drive engagement, increase your reach, and connect your audience beyond the primary screen. If you’ve got any questions, or you want to know how exactly you can use audience interaction tools for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team of specialists today.
