Don’t Lose Your Audience!
It’s vital that we respect the time and interests of the people who are consuming our content. This video and paired blog will talk about some very simple things you can do to engage your audience and show respect for their time!
#1 — Get to the point.
Jump right in. Give them the core of what you’re trying to communicate right away.
Get into the meat of the subject as soon as possible so that they don’t have to sit through some long introduction waiting for you to get to the reason that they’ve actually come in.
They may tune out, sign off, or scroll away.
#2 — Start your timed content ON TIME.
If you are running webinars and other timed content, make sure that you start them on time.
If you have said that something is going to start at 11:00 am, start it at 11:00 am.
The people that have showed up live for this have set aside this time in their calendar to be available — and most of them probably won’t appreciate if you are doing a lot of warming up or waiting around, hoping that more people will show up.
Just get started on time and respect the time of the people that are in your audience.
#3 — Know your audience’s preferred content method.
Take note of whether your audience tends to prefer receiving content from you in a video form, in a written form or an audio form like a podcast, or some combination of all of those.
You can observe whether your videos are being watched, or emails being opened, to help you assess. You can also just ask them.
I like to create content that allows people to consume my content in whichever way that they wish to. So with most of my videos and audio recordings, there is also written text that accompanies that communication.
This allows for those who prefer to read to be able to either consume all of the content visually, or allows them to at least have a bit of an overview to see whether or not this is something they’re interested in, and whether it’s worth their time.
We do not need to “trick” people into watching a video by failing to explain what the video contains! That doesn’t serve our service-based business at all. It only leaves them feeling frustrated that they spent time on something they didn’t need or want.
If you’re scrolling through Facebook or looking at a website and you simply see a video and there’s no title, and there’s no information in text, you don’t know whether it’s worth your time to stop and watch that content.
So it’s very helpful if you can at least give them enough text to ascertain whether or not they want to take the time to watch or listen.
As much as possible, try to offer multiple avenues of content for the different types of learners – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. You can do this by re-purposing content into different forms.
#4 — Play to your strengths.
How do you best deliver content?
- Are you an amazing writer?
- Are you really good on video?
- Are you really good at speaking live?
- What is your best delivery method and how do you shine the most?
Start with that as your initial form of delivery. Then expand.
If you’re really good at creating videos, then perhaps the bulk of your content is video and then you can have it transcribed and turn that into text.
If you’re an excellent writer, then perhaps you begin by writing a blog or an article or a post and then if you really want to have that as an audio or video, you can then take that written form and turn it into something else.
#5 — Stay on topic and be succinct.
Whether your content is delivered in written form or video or audio, be sure that you’re staying on topic, that you don’t stray too far into a bunch of tangential stories.
Give your audience what they came there to see.
This is particularly true when you are using written text — make sure that your text is very clear, succinct, and that you don’t have large blocks of content or paragraphs.
You want to keep short, nice little easy to read, phrases, sentences, and bullet points that are eye catching and very easy to read.
Most people in your audience are probably skimming through for the heart of the content.
If they can’t find what they’re looking for easily, they’ll move on.
Freebie for You…
If you want to learn more about keeping your audience engaged, you might enjoy this special freebie about how to incorporate your audience’s decision styles into your Content.
You can grab it here!