It’s All About Audience Engagement

When conducting a public relations campaign, it is vital to identify your target audience, so that you can fully engage with them. This encourages heavy two-way communication between the audience and the public. Through audience interest, feedback, and events, a public relations professional should have the adequate methods necessary to fully engage the audience. Business News Daily states that you should ask yourself, “Who follows your brand? Who would you like to follow your brand? Has your audience changed?” when you are deciding how to engage with your audience (Waltower).

How Should I Get Engaged?

The first way to gauge your audience's attention is through audience interest. This involves appealing to the interests of the audience, rather than identifying the needs of the organization. This is known as salience, which is “the degree to which an audience perceives information as applicable or useful” (Smith). When using audience interest to engage your audience, you should aim your message based on the values that are shared amongst the organization and the public.

Audience Participation is another method of engaging your audience. This entails bringing your audience in direct contact with the good, service, or product. This provides real-world experience with this good, service, or product. The organization should want to showcase what they offer, in order to encourage audience engagement with the brand or company.

Through the use of audience feedback, you can create a conversation about your audience's opinions, thoughts, and interpretations of your product, good, or survey. Using research methods like a survey, focus group, intercept interviews, etc., you will be able to get the thoughts of your audiences, in order that you can better serve your identified target audiences. Social media is another method of gauging feedback from your audience. “Feedback is important across an entire organization to remain aligned to goals, create strategies, develop service improvements, improve relationships and to continue learning” (Healan). Through audience feedback, you might receive complaints, which can help the client address issues within their good, product, or service.

The next method of engaging your audience is through the use of a triggering event. This is “an activity that stimulates action among key publics” (Smith). This could include a speech that encourages attendees to sign a petition to end homelessness in Oklahoma City or even awareness days for specific diseases. These events can sometimes be unplanned, so it is important to take advantage of these events as they become available.

Special Events are another way of engaging your audience. Through the use of special events, the client can interact with the public through planned tactics. This could gain the attention of your key publics, influencing them to get involved, purchase your product, or become intrigued by your service. Publicity stunts and photo ops are two ways of using tactics at special events to gain your audience’s attention.

These are only a few of the many ways to engage with your audience during a public relations campaign. Through this engagement, it will become more prevalent who your primary audiences are and how you can conduct your research, in order to better suit them.

Sources

Deziel, M. (2020, December 11). Photo by Melanie Deziel on unsplash. Beautiful Free Images & Pictures. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://unsplash.com/photos/fSWQPBxqClg

Green, N. (2017, July 30). Photo by Nicholas Green on unsplash. Beautiful Free Images & Pictures. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://unsplash.com/photos/nPz8akkUmDI

Smith, R. D. (2021). Step 5: Creating Action and Response Strategies. In Strategic planning for public relations (pp. 159-164). essay, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Healan, L. (2020, July 30). The importance of feedback in PR from media, to writing to client relationships. Amendola Communications. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.acmarketingpr.com/feedback-public-relations/

Waltower, S. How to build and track audience engagement. Business News Daily. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/9740-audience-engagement-strategies.html