Customers and audiences have increasingly shorter attention spans and content quality and relevance is critical for them to find the signal within the saturation of noise and engage with your content.
To better engage with audiences and stakeholders, incentivisation is critical in encouraging viewers to become more involved with the content and the online community. This should be mutually beneficial in leveraging their involvement and providing them with direct access to the support and calls to action they require. A key question to ask in creating and posting content is:
Why would my audience (internal and/or external) want to watch, engage or interact with this content? What’s in it for them?
Aside from access, incentives also include rewarding desired behaviours and encouraging audience member and stakeholders to contribute to the community or group. This is applicable to stand alone content, integrated campaigns and social platforms. To provide some structure to incentivising engagement, the “SAPS” model is a handy approach to identifying the predominant incentive structures used to motivate and direct behaviours of a respective audience. SAPS involves the following incentive categories:
Ultimately, the objective of both formal and inform incentives is to deploy them to move audiences up the “Engagement Ladder” by incentivising audiences to move from an observer to a contributor. This is not bound only to social media, as the means of incentivising individuals to contribute is universal across all elements of input.
Look to compile a list of calls to action that the respective audience is going to respond to and seek to deploy these throughout the content to provide easy and direct access and to create a user friendly experience. Where appropriate, encourage structured input from your audience as an opportunity to interact. Remember too that formal incentives involving tangible giveaways don’t have to be crass “free stuff”, but can be used in alignment with education, training, professional development or the like or in the case of internal audiences and stakeholders, as an overall initiative to reward and recognise the collective achievement.
