The key to building and maintaining your followers is keeping them engaged. The internet never lacks a constant stream of new distractions, and that can leave you reaching for ways to keep your audience hooked.
The double-edged sword of social media’s never-ending content scroll and immediate connections means that brands and influencers have to become masters at nurturing their relationship with their user base. SMS is the perfect answer for deepening those strong audience connections to support your other social platform communications and media.
Let’s talk about how to engage an audience! Below, we cover some of the things you can do to use SMS to your advantage and keep attention focused on you.
1. Understand Your Audience
Audience engagement is crucial for any successful SMS text marketing channel. Here are some tips:
Nobody likes to feel invisible. While it’s true that people love to follow their favorite athletes, actors, musicians, and online personalities, they can easily become disillusioned if they feel there’s no potential for interaction. Your followers already feel like they know you. You’ll see amazing results by reciprocating interest and getting to know your crowd.
Pay Attention to Your Followers
Prompt your fan base to share their interests, preferences, and needs. Make use of audience data from prior interactions, conduct surveys about topics that align with your culture, and make it a regular part of how you connect.
Segment Your Audience
Use segmenting to focus on identifiers like follower demographics and content preferences. You can message segmented groups in unique ways that let them know you’re paying attention to their needs.
Be Consistent
You want your subscribers to expect consistency. If your messaging is sporadic, they will eventually lose interest or simply fill the time they spent following you with something else.
2. Utilize Social Media
People often make the mistake of only building their audience on a single social media platform. While the next logical step is expanding your social presence, SMS is a powerful tool that helps you connect personally with your social media followers in a different, ownable medium.
Texting is a great way to reach your most engaged fans looking to subscribe to that next level of access and communication. Social media and SMS strategies can synergistically enhance each other.
Promote Your SMS Campaigns
Make sure people on social media know what they’re missing out on, and encourage them to sign up for your SMS subscription. Share screenshots of texts to create a FOMO effect and make it clear what the benefits of joining your exclusive text community are.
Make Sign-Ups Easy
Use keyword-enabled sign-ups so all they have to do is text the right word to you to subscribe.
Run a Contest
Use your social media platforms to run a contest or giveaway. All users have to do is sign up for your SMS campaign to enter—talk about keeping them engaged! People will pay attention with the anticipation of finding out if they won.
3. Personalize How You Message Your Audience
Personalization is all about tailoring your content to individual preferences. Personalized messaging resonates more powerfully than static texts alone. Understanding audience demographics, interests, and behaviors can foster a sense of connection and relevance with your fans.
4. Craft Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is most effective when implemented with your personalization insights. Harvesting quality data about your followers’ interests and online activities enables you to cater your brand messaging to the things that they prioritize. Building a correlation between the things people care about and your brand is a great way to get an engagement boost
and build interest from casual followers.
Regular interaction, strategic campaigns, and shareable content contribute to a broader audience recognizing and remembering your brand.
5. Build Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is an important element of letting every individual know they are appreciated. Give your subscribers exclusive offers, behind-the-scenes access, and consistent engagement. Maybe you invite them to send questions for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) or give them exclusive content not available anywhere else. Every subscriber who took the time to join your list is special. Letting them know that regularly builds lifelong loyalty.
6. Harness Powerful SMS Audience Engagement Strategies
Constructing a robust engagement strategy involves understanding your audience, utilizing effective social media campaigns, and leveraging personalization techniques to enhance brand awareness and foster customer loyalty.
Using SMS to captivate your audience is ideal, with many benefits of live social media interaction and email lists combined, but without the drawbacks. SMS is instant, and your subscribers have already joined your list, so there’s no delay and no spam folder to contend with.
Tailor Your SMS Campaigns to Match Your Style
Your followers are unique, so your SMS approach should be customized to cater to them. With Subtext’s SMS platform, you can create exclusive communities where your supporters can ask questions, respond to surveys, and be the first to receive your content. The following are a few examples of how you can use SMS to personalize your follower interactions.
SMS for Creators
For podcasters, TikTokers, YouTubers, and creators using popular audience-supported platforms, SMS offers the perfect mechanism to actually own your relationship with your audience and engage with fans. Use Subtext to converse with your audience between podcast episodes or share dance videos.
You can create an exclusive community for your top fans, letting them be the first to learn of news and important updates. Run new content ideas past your biggest fans and bring them into the creative process. Solicit questions to answer on the next podcast or collect photos and videos to create user-generated content. You can also create member-only events.
SMS for Entertainers
For actors, musicians, and artists of all trades, SMS can help famous personalities convert their casual followers into faithful lifetime fans. SMS isn’t just about text. You can record voice messages, share an exclusive song release before the rest of the world hears it, and create personalized voicemails. Let your SMS fans be the first to know about the release date for new music with an exclusive pre-save link.
SMS for Newsroom and Media
Enhance your audience’s experience with the immediacy of breaking news while building and retaining loyal subscribers.
Text helps you cut through the noise and get important news and updates directly into the hands of the people who need to know. Reach a wide demographic even in extreme weather events; your subscribers will receive notices even during power outages or when the internet is inaccessible.
Get Started with Subtext for Your SMS Engagement Channels
Subtext offers a dynamic platform where you can bring all your direct subscriber interactions together, organize effective SMS campaigns, manage subscribers, schedule custom events, and show your loyal fans how much you appreciate them.
The following are some of the specific features you’ll be able to tap into:
- Create voicemails.
- Record audio of unreleased material.
- Schedule messaging between podcasts or other scheduled events.
- Create templated replies.
- Design auto-replies for specific keywords.
- Make custom landing pages.
- Design keyword-enabled sign-ups.
- Use CSV imports with segmentation.
- Send promo codes.
- Learn about your fans with our deep audience analytics.
Ready to start engaging with your loyal fans? Book your demo today!