Engagement, Uninterrupted

In marketing, it’s crucial to understand how your audience moves through different stages of connection with your brand. At each stage, their level of attention and commitment changes, and your strategy needs to adjust accordingly. In this blog, we’ll focus on Level 3: Keeping Your Audience Engaged—the stage where you’ve captured their attention, but distractions start to pull them away.

You’ve already defined your audience and crafted a message that speaks to them. But now, the challenge is to keep them engaged. They might have shown interest, but without careful attention, distractions—whether external (like slow Wi-Fi) or personal (like a stressful day)—can easily cause them to lose focus.

Level 3 is about managing these distractions and maintaining that connection, ensuring that your audience stays engaged enough to move to the next phase in their journey with your brand.

At Level 3, it's essential to limit these distractions—both internal and external—so you can maintain your customers' attention. This is where the real challenge lies. While you can’t control everything, like your customers’ personal lives, you can work to create an environment where they feel less distracted and more focused on your message.

Focusing on What Matters

Think about your own experience as a consumer. You’re constantly filtering out distractions. Whether you’re browsing a website or scrolling through social media, there’s always a noise to drown out. Your customers are doing the same thing. They might be interested in your product or content, but they’re also juggling their own distractions. It's like swimming upstream to keep their focus on what you have to offer.

So, how do you combat that? While you can’t change your customer’s environment, you can create authentic content that resonates with them and makes it easy for them to connect with you. Focus on what’s frustrating in their engagement process and figure out how you can eliminate or reduce those pain points.

Cutting Out the Distractions

Levels 1 and 2 were all about identifying and connecting with your customers. Now, at Level 3, you need to focus on presenting your message in a way that’s clear and without distractions. Make sure your content is relevant, easy to understand, and free from anything that could cause confusion or frustration. The goal is to speak to your customers in a way that feels natural and engaging.

Take a moment to think about your website. Have you done a thorough analysis of potential distractions? Are there issues with your online ordering system, like pop-up ads or slow load times? These are things you can control, and they can make a big difference in whether or not your customer stays engaged.

Social Media and Platforms: Know Your Limits

When it comes to social media or other platforms, distractions are inevitable. But you can still operate effectively within those limitations by understanding how your audience interacts with the platform. If your customers are bombarded with pop-ups, constant ads, or too many notifications, they'll quickly get frustrated and disengage. The goal here is to streamline the experience and make it as easy as possible for your audience to connect with you.

Earning Their Trust and Respect

At this stage, you’re working to earn your customers’ respect and trust. This means making it easy for them to connect with you and gradually guiding them toward deeper engagement. But it’s important to remember that you’re not asking for too much too soon. You don’t want to ask them to make a purchase while also signing up for an email list. Instead, focus on a simple, clear call to action. Maybe it’s as simple as getting them to check out just one product instead of overwhelming them with all your offerings.

Sometimes, the simplest approach has the biggest impact. You’ve already worked hard to attract your customers’ attention, and now it’s time to guide them to the next step without overwhelming them.

What’s Next?

You’ve attracted their attention, and they’re ready to engage without distractions. In my next blog, Level 4: Structure Dependent Engagement, we’ll dive into how to take that engagement to the next level. Stay tuned!

The Seventh Level Framework, created by Amanda Slavin, is the leading framework for analyzing and elevating audience engagement. It provides you with the language you need to define and understand engagement, as well as a springboard for elevating connections up the ladder of distinct engagement levels.