Audience Engagement Tools for Marketers: A Comprehensive Overview

Engaging with your audience is the key to building long-term customers and brand loyalty. It allows you to better position and market your products and understand the needs of your target audience more deeply. To surpass the ever-increasing competition, marketers require effective engagement tools that can help them win over potential customers and retain existing ones. This article will explore the top audience engagement tools available to narrow your search and find what you need to succeed more quickly.

What Is Audience Engagement?

Audience engagement is an intentional strategy that transforms passive consumers into active contributors. The intent is to facilitate dialogue and conversation with your audience, so the associated techniques are fun! They aim to inspire your audience to interact with your brand. 

Why Is Audience Engagement Important?

To grow your business and help it thrive, audience engagement is a must. It provides a wealth of advantages, including:

1. Build and retain a loyal customer base: When people feel connected to your brand, they’re more likely to continue supporting and purchasing from you.
2. Increase brand awareness: Social media, events, and other forms of communication are excellent channels to expand brand awareness. When people engage with your content on these portals, they’re more likely to share it with their own networks and so widen your reach.
3. Drive customer satisfaction: By actively engaging with your audience, you gain valuable feedback and insights that you can use to improve your products or services. This, in turn, can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
4. Foster a sense of community: Regular interactions induce a feeling of inclusivity, which contributes to a more positive perception of your business and encourages people to become brand advocates.
5. Boost sales and conversion rate: Engaged audiences are more likely to convert and make purchases. By building relationships and engaging with your audience, you increase the likelihood of them making a purchase or taking a desired action.

How do I Measure Audience Engagement?

Digging into audience engagement activity can help marketers measure marketing performance. As with all marketing campaigns and activities, identifying key KPIs and metrics are required in order to measure success. For example, in order to track virtual event ROI, you must first decide upon the virtual event metrics that will be tracked to determine success. Different engagement tools will offer different types of analytics.

Video Engagement Platforms

Video has become one of the most popular and effective forms of content for engaging audiences. Video engagement platforms provide marketers with a range of tools to create, manage, and distribute this visual content. Wyzowl found an overwhelming 91% of businesses employ video as a marketing tool, and 88% of marketers who use it say it's an important part of their marketing strategy.

Virtual events are a key format often used to engage audience members via live streaming or recorded video.

Three popular video content solutions are:

Demio

Demio offers a suite of features that allow audience members to participate in the virtual experience. Attendees can interact with their host and each other through chat, live polling, handouts, and calls to action, making it one of the most effective webinar and video platforms for engagement. Additionally, Demio hosts receive real-time audience data for immediate optimization.

Vimeo

A popular video hosting and management platform, Vimeo enables companies to create and share high-quality videos. It has robust editing tools, CDN (content delivery network), and API integration capabilities.

Vidyard

This all-in-one video marketing platform provides users with video creation, hosting, and sharing tools. Vidyard’s interactive capabilities include video annotations, calls to action, and personalized video creation.

Trivia Engagement Platforms

Trivia is a fun way to interact with your audience while educating them about your brand. Platforms can facilitate quizzes, games, and other engaging experiences to keep audiences attentive. DemandGen Report reveals that interactive content options generate up to twice the engagement rate compared to static alternatives, pointing to the higher engagement levels you can achieve through interactive experiences.

Two popular options in this category include:

Kahoot!

This game-based learning platform enables users to create and host interactive quizzes, surveys, and polls. Kahoot! has long been a popular choice for online education and training courses.

TriviaMaker

TriviaMaker is a cloud-based trivia game platform that lets users construct custom quizzes and games. It possesses built-in image and video capabilities and supports multiple languages.

Q&A and Poll Platforms

Q&A and poll platforms open help create a dialogue between the audience and the company. They enable businesses to develop more meaningful relationships with customers by listening to their inquiries and feedback. It’s crucial to learn their preferences and dislikes since 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Q&A and poll platforms contribute to that undertaking by identifying and addressing their concerns. With 73% of customers expecting brands to understand their unique needs and expectations, Q&A and poll platforms are instrumental in gaining insights into customer needs and preferences to produce more tailored marketing efforts. 

Here are a few recommended solutions:

Slido

Slido offers a range of features to manage online events. It provides real-time results and analytics, supports live video streaming, and works with most major video conferencing tools.

Mentimeter

This option is a real-time polling and survey platform designed for events and lectures. It has both free and paid versions, includes over 40 different question types, and allows customization of visual styles.

Demio

Demio's Q&A and polling features enable businesses to interact with audiences in real time so they can receive feedback, answer queries, and engage users.

Interactive Tools Platforms

In addition to video and trivia, there are many other interactive tools that businesses can use to engage with their audiences, such as whiteboards, live chat, and interactive demos. In fact, 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat support.

Popular tools in this category are:

Navattic

With Navattic, you can craft interactive product demos and embed them in your website.

Demio

Demio provides robust interactive tools, including the ability to share files, engage with polls, trivia, and Q&A. All engagement data is instantly available through the analytics console, providing a comprehensive understanding of audience behavior and optimization opportunities.

Gamification Tools Platforms

Gamification is the concept of adding game-like elements to non-gaming experiences to make them more engaging. These tools typically leverage rewards, points, and progress indicators to motivate users to take specific actions. Spinify shared that 90% of employees admit to being more productive when applying gamification, demonstrating the effectiveness of gamified experiences in driving desired behaviors.

If you want to delve into gamification, consider the following tools:

Influitive

‍Influitive gamifies advocacy and engagement for your brand’s customers. This solution allows you to generate buyer reviews, encourage customer referrals, generate valuable consumer feedback, grow product adoption, and onboard and empower new customers.

LevelEleven

‍LevelEleven applies game mechanics to motivate sales teams, creating a competitive and rewarding work environment. It tracks sales performance in real time, provides leaderboards, and enables managers to coach and motivate their teams. LevelEleven also connects to Salesforce to track sales data.

Conclusion

Marketers looking to stay competitive must evaluate how they are engaging their audience. There are a wealth of tools available to make it easy for marketers to drive engagement in their marketing campaigns, and as always, be sure before you jump into any new tools, that you’re clear on the marketing effectiveness metrics you’ll use to evaluate success. Demio serves as an easy to use tool that drives participation from webinar attendees. Try Demio for free for 14 days.