Engagement: How to Create a Loyal Audience That Loves You

Is audience loyalty important to your business?

Are you wondering how you can increase your audience loyalty through engagement?

To learn the importance of engagement, I interview Danny Iny for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Danny Iny, author of Engagement from Scratch! He is also the founder of Firepole Marketing (now Mirasee) and host of the Connect, Engage, Inspire podcast (now the Business Reimagined podcast) .

Danny shares his techniques for increasing engagement, which engenders loyalty in his audience.

You'll find out how to define engagement in your business, the benefits of it and how to get started.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Engagement
From a writer to someone who specializes in engaging audiences

Danny shares that he has been writing since childhood, and started a copywriting business when he was young.

In 2006, he wrote his first book, Ordinary Miracles: Harness the Power of Writing to Get Your Point Across! In the book, he discusses his ideas about writing and how to write well. Although it's a great book, Danny didn't get the response he was looking for.

The lesson he learned is that when you write copy, it's not actually about the words. You need to understand the people you want to connect with, and understand what matters to them.

Danny's copywriting practice evolved over time into a marketing and strategy consultancy.

You'll hear what happened when he attended local networking sessions that made him want to create a training program.

Danny soon discovered that people who didn't have an audience wanted to know more about engagement; and therefore, he wanted to help them. He started to reach out to all of the experts who had built an engaged audience from nothing.

With their input and perspectives, his new book, Engagement from Scratch! was created.

Listen to the show to find out why it's important to be sensitive to other people's needs.

Definition of engagement

Since his latest book was published, Danny says that he has developed the insight that engagement is about the deep emotional investment that people have in what you are doing.

If you think about Apple's customers, they are members of the Apple tribe. The fact that they use Apple's products actually says something about who that person is. It's a piece of their identity.

Not only are these customers incredibly engaged, they are also invested in what Apple does. If the company were to betray the values they stand for, the response would be dramatic. They would feel like a friend had betrayed them.

Danny says that the best model for conceptualizing engagement is by increasing the feeling of commitment through rewards over time. When someone discovers you for the first time, there is no connection, relationship or engagement. You have to give them something to keep them coming back.

Make sure you give people an opportunity to provide you with their name and email address. Once they commit, you can reward them.

You'll find out another great way to get people to invest some of their time and attention, which will help you build a relationship with them. It's important to stand out from the competition, and one way to do this is to answer emails personally. This puts you in a whole different category.

To be a good email marketer, you need to have a double opt-in, a one-click Unsubscribe button and a high content-to-pitch ratio.