Trends of the Trade: Achieving Audience Engagement

Trends of the Trade is a monthly column written by WWPR member Cory Churches exploring, well, trends in PR.Follow her @Coricita or reach her at Cory.Churches@gmail.com. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Washington Women in Public Relations If you attend any of the networking events hosted by the myriad of PR and Communications groups, including WWPR and PRSA, you’ll likely hear discussions about audience engagement. It’s the ultimate goal for any public relations campaign and the ever-elusive goal for many organizations. The sweet spot to achieving successful audience and client engagement lies in the intersection between content marketing, targeted communication, and technology. While creating quality content that customers and audiences want is always the challenge, sometimes the larger challenge is ensuring that they are receiving said content. More than a few tools exist that can help you organize, track, distribute and proliferate your messages. Here are some that can get you started. Gaggle Amp is “the social marketing platform that lets companies amplify their social media reach by leveraging individual employees, customers and partners.” The application allows companies, non-profits, political campaigns, and major brands share information and engage more of their audience by managing their social media channels and measuring the impact of campaigns. Zamba.me Soapbox^TM is a service that helps expand your Twitter network by introducing you and your tweets to a new community of like-minded individuals. By refining your profile to identify the types of individuals and organizations with whom you’d like to converse, Zamba.me Soapbox finds quality new followers who are tuned into your message, resulting in more robust sharing and conversations. Greg Chase, an advisor to vTricity, the company that created Zamba.me, says that Zamba.me Soapbox lends a hand in building quality and credible audiences by engaging users and promoting Twitter handles to an as yet unknown network of influencers. The result is the same if you had the time and energy to do it yourself, Zamba.me just makes it easier in a shorter amount of time. Kapost is a content marketing platform that allows users to plan, organize, manage workflow, distribute, and analyze content across a variety of platforms. Managing where content exists, who’s seeing it, and how successful campaigns are in achieving their goals is invaluable to an organization. Kapost also has a wealth of resources for companies in any stage of the content marketing process. From strategy and ideation to distribution and analytics, Kapost has eBooks, videos, presentations and blog entries to help users refine and plan their best approach to their audiences and messages. Creating, delivering, and measuring messages can take teams of staff to ensure an organization is spending valuable resources in the right place and on the right messages. The tools above can help an individual or a team maintain and manage messages to maximize return on investment.