Audience Engagement Strategies That Work

Successfully engaging an audience increases participation, improves learning and heightens satisfaction.  Engaged audiences share their experience on social media. They become your brand ambassadors; creating buzz and building referrals and interest for future events. 

Read on for some great ideas on audience engagement how to’s:

Set the Scene

Assuming your event marketing is effective, registrations are ticking along nicely and attendee numbers are growing. Now’s the time to launch a clever pre-event engagement campaign to create interest and build anticipation for those attending the event. 

• Host an online community to connect delegates, speakers and exhibitors. You’ll be creating opportunities for pre-conference relationship building and find out what’s important to your audience. 
• Use email automations to deliver a content series answering questions about the conference, sharing stories from your speakers, or giving a behind-the-scenes peek at how the event is coming together. 
• Create a social media content strategy for the months leading up to the conference that reinforces and extends the email series. 

• Make it easy for people to share about the event on social media. Create a custom event hashtag and communicate about it often. Ask people to use it when posting on social media and offer creative ideas to get them started.

A clever pre-event engagement campaign creates interest and builds delegate anticipation

Keep Them Guessing

Engagement starts with choosing the right speakers and making sure the room is comfortable but it shouldn’t end there. Including the unexpected boosts interaction, participation and energy. 

• Instead of waiting for the traditional hand-held mic to be passed around the audience, use one of the new soft, throwable versions to move things along faster, get more people asking questions and add some fun. 
• Use live Q&A and polling to gather audience opinions and share in real-time. Making people feel valued and included in the discussion increases motivation to participate.
• Mobile event apps allow attendees to plan their own unique conference experience. Invest in a good one that can build agendas, find answers to FAQs, and send out session alerts.

Today’s conference delegates don’t just want to be educated and entertained; they want to feel important, be inspired and stirred emotionally. 

Audience engagement means something different to everyone but no matter the individual definition, one thing that’s certain is its importance in building a successful conference; one that keeps people coming back year after year.