Effectively Engaging With Your Audience as a Mission-Driven Business
Mission-driven broadcasters thrive on deep, meaningful engagement with their audience. Learn how to boost engagement and build a loyal following with these effective strategies.
Mission-driven organizations walk the line between operating like a typical business and working toward a higher purpose. Regardless of whether they are operating in a for-profit or non-profit setting, they have to generate income, pay bills, and hire people while pursuing things like faith-based, environmental, or community goals.
This means even as it works toward higher objectives, a mission-driven business must cultivate a healthy following of loyal supporters. This group of individuals must buy into a company’s mission and believe in what it is doing.
This is where engagement comes into the picture.
Why Engagement Is So Important for Mission-Driven Companies
Customer engagement consists of getting your customers to not just listen to but interact with your company. Salesforce describes customer engagement as “delivering connected experiences to your customers instead of single, one-off, or fleeting transactions.”
Engaging with your brand’s audience is a meaningful, consistent activity that builds relationships and fosters loyalty. It generates feedback loops and helps businesses remain in touch with their customer’s needs and how their products and services can address them.
In the case of a mission-driven organization, engagement is particularly important. It helps your target audience buy into your passions, develop loyalty to your brand, and drive long-term sustainability for your operation. In addition, good engagement can develop your audience into advocates who can amplify your mission through word-of-mouth awareness.
Engaging With Your Audience
If your audience isn’t engaging with your mission-driven organization as much as you’d like, there are ways you can increase those interactions. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.
1. Be Deliberate in Communicating Your Mission
Gallup points out that a strong mission naturally differentiates a brand and stokes engagement. However, it adds that even in the case of employees (who you expect would be in the know), less than half actually know what values their company stands for.
If you want to encourage engagement with your mission-driven organization, make sure you’re communicating the mission, vision, values, and philosophy that drive your brand — not just to your employees but to your customers, too.
2. Use Community Events
Mission-driven companies are particularly suited to engage in community-focused events. This can be participating in a local event that resonates with your mission and increases your impact.
You can also use online events to improve engagement. Webinars and workshops are popular ways to do this, and there are many tools that can transform these into interactive events primed to increase engagement.
Sardius Media’s platform broadcasting platform, for instance, helps infuse video feeds with a variety of engaging elements. When we helped FILO (First In Last Out) put on an online event for technical artists in the local church, we improved engagement through things like live chat rooms run by presenters, Q&As, dynamic sponsor experiences, and breakout sessions.
If you want to engage with your audience, use events to bring them together and invite them in on your brand’s experience, vision, and underlying passion.
3. Encourage User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful engagement technique. It establishes two-way communication channels that encourage your audience to not only consume your brand’s content but create it, too.
UGC can take many forms, from direct feedback to company reviews, testimonials, and case studies. Its best use case, though, is social media. Social media is a neutral ground where a brand can engage with its target audience on their terms. This can lead to a variety of UGC, including comments, shared posts, and hashtag campaigns. Influencers can also elicit user-generated content from an audience of loyal individuals primed to engage with mission-driven companies that they endorse.
If you want to improve engagement, ask your audience to do more than engage. Ask them to generate content right alongside you.
4. Build Synergistic Collaborations
We already mentioned working with influencers to engage with your target audience. You can apply a similar approach to other businesses, too. Building synergistic collaborations with partnering brands is a great way to spread brand awareness and improve your reach.
One example of this is when Walmart and Ritz partnered to support the Happy Pantry product. The two brands collaborated on their shared vision to combat food insecurity. They worked with collaborators to spread awareness of the campaign, which led, among other things, to posts like this one from influencer Ania Morton, which was liked 5,826 times as of this writing.
If you want to encourage people to engage with your brand, align with other organizations that share your mission to get the word out.
Building Engaged Audiences as a Mission-Driven Organization
It doesn’t matter if you are a mission-driven business, non-profit, church, or any other kind of organization. If you’re building a brand, you want to have a loyal following — and that requires consistent engagement.
This starts with clear communication of your core mission-driven message. From there, use strategies like community events, user-generated content, and synergistic collaborations to get people in on the action.
If you need help building engaging events online, our team at Sardius Media is here to help. We’d love to explore your situation with you. Together, we can identify its engagement potential and help you build a broadcasting setup that can help you effectively communicate your message and encourage greater audience engagement.