Tips for Engaging Your Audience with Audio

You’ve got your equipment, your topic, and are in a room with good acoustics. Your content is before you, you’ve cleared your throat, and you’re ready to press record.

Wait!

Before you start recording, we’ve got one more article in our series on audio blogging. This time, we’ve gathered up our best tips for engaging your audience with audio, so you can put the right foot forward on your journey into audio blogging.

What does an engaged audience look like?

Everyone wants an engaged audience, but what exactly does that mean? An engaged audience is one that regularly interacts with your content, reviewing what you’ve already developed and consuming what’s new as it comes out. Numbers can indicate an engaged audience, but you shouldn’t rely solely on them to measure the health of your content.

Instead, consider the quality of your audience, how connected they feel with your content, and other non-quantifiable information to determine how well your content is engaging them.

Tips for engaging your audience with audio

Make use of other forms of content in addition to audio

Don’t feel like you have to rely entirely on audio content to power your content strategy. Continue to develop written content, and engage your audience by including other forms of content, such as polls, graphics, and other things that can help them digest your audio content.

Videos are hugely popular as well, so consider making a few videos on topics relating to your blog content and embed these in your blog and share them with your audience. Keeping them interacting with different types of content from you will keep them interested and invested in your content.

Pretend you’re speaking with one person

By developing an avatar for your audience, you can develop a more targeted message for your content. Sometimes called personas, these avatars represent your ideal customer. For example, we might create the persona of Jackie, a middle-aged mom living with her husband and two daughters in Atlanta who loves baking, riding her Peloton bike, and movie nights at home with her family. Or, we could create Cassandra, a single millennial who recently relocated to San Diego for college, who loves to surf, volunteer at her local dog shelter, and have brunch with her friends on the weekends.

Developing these avatars also helps you to speak more casually when recording, making the audio content more engaging than if your voice stilted, flat, or nervous. Your goal is to be relatable to your audience. The sound of your voice helps to build trust, authenticity, and connection in a way writing alone can’t.

Focus your content strategically

Especially if you’re just launching your blog, don’t let the topics you cover careen wildly all over the place. Instead, stay focused and keep the areas you write and record about tightly grouped. This will also go a long way toward helping you determine who your ideal audience is and create your audience persona. If readers and listeners know what to expect when they come to your blog, they’ll be more likely to make a habit of coming to stay and listen to your newest posts.

For example, say you covered a controversial NFL game from 1996 on your blog last week, and this week you’re recording a treatise on why “Crazy He Calls Me” by Billie Holiday is obviously her greatest hit. Next week, you’ve planned a piece on J. Edgar Hoover’s childhood.

See a pattern here? Neither do we. And neither will your audience. Which means the variety-show attempt to cover everything won’t likely draw them in and keep them coming back. Keep your content sharp and focused on a single topic or group of related topics.

Don’t forget to include a call-to-action

The call-to-action, or CTA, is a critical component of written blogs, and should be for your audio content as well. A CTA is essentially you giving your audience a directive – leading them toward their next steps. Your content, if it’s engaging, will make them want to do something, and it’s your job to tell them what that something is.

Want them to subscribe to your blog? Tell them! Want them to sign up for your newsletter? Tell them? Want them to engage with you in the comments? Again, tell them! Make it known what you want your audience to do after reading or listening to your content.

One last tip – don’t try to get them to take several actions at once. Work on building toward inspiring them to take action throughout your content, and then give them one clear step forward to take. Try to get them to do too many things at once, and they’ll likely lose interest before they begin.

How can audio revolutionize the way you engage with your audience?

Audio is an extraordinarily powerful way to get (and hold) your audience’s attention. In our on-the-move society, with life moving faster than ever, audio is the wave of the future. Sharing audio versions of your content allows people to consume it while doing almost anything, from driving to running to mopping the floor, so they don’t have to wait for an opportunity to sit down before a screen to read.

Put simply, audio is a great way to connect and engage with your audience. The sound of your voice is so personal and unique that it creates a sense of familiarity between you and the listener in a way that just can’t happen with written content alone.

Are you ready to start using audio to enhance your blog posts? Sign up for access to Allears today. Allears lets you record, edit, upload and embed audio files all from one place, simplifying the process so that anyone can do it. Join us today and become a part of the audio revolution.