Mar 16, 20215 min read

How to integrate your App into your Engagement Strategy

As you become more comfortable with incorporating Fabrik into your daily workflows, you may have realised the importance of strategic planning around how you're engaging your audience using your app.

Your app audience is more often than not your most engaged, most loyal audience and therefore may require an approach to engagement that's different to your other channels!

Your app is also packed with unique features and functionality you can leverage to create a memorable experience for your app community and value for your advertisers.

As such, we recommend implementing a two-pronged approach to your app engagement that keeps your app top-of-mind, by incorporating events, campaigns or special programming as well as ongoing inclusion in daily programming.

Implementing a successful app engagement strategy requires collaboration across all teams within your organisation, so here are some steps on how to ensure you are doing so in the most effective way.

step 1: consider your overall audience engagement objectives

When creating your app engagement strategy, it's important to keep your overall audience engagement strategy across all your channels in mind.

These may be broad directives informed by your overall business strategy such as expanding your reach across all channels, measuring and increasing audience engagement based on specific metrics or building your audience to position and support your advertising offering in a certain way.

In terms of formulating that overall audience engagement strategy, we generally recommend considering the following aspects:

Growth - what are the ways you're consistently growing your audience by connecting with individuals on different channels who were not aware you existed before?
Engagement - once someone has connected with you on one or more of your channels, how are you adding ongoing value to them to ensure you retain them as a loyal follower?
Monetisation - once you've grown your audience and are adding ongoing value to them, how are you positioning your audience in a way that it is attractive to advertisers?

(If you're uncertain about how to create an engagement strategy, get in touch with us - we can help!)

Step 2: Prepare your App Experience to support your Audience Engagement initiatives

Once your overall audience engagement strategy is in place, the next step is to configure the engagement aspects of your app to enable the app engagement you'd like to encourage.

Conversations and Channels are the two types of messaging groups available within your app that can be configured to different types of engagement, as follows:

Conversations are true engagement groups, interactive message groups where anyone who is a part of that conversation can post content.
Channels are read-only message groups in which only 'Trusted' individuals (members who you assign the 'Trusted' status, such as administrators or moderators) can post content.

Decide what types of groups you need according to key initiatives in your business, and configure them according to the level of interaction you would like.

Remember that Contact Us is a Direct Messaging conversation where each app member can connect directly with you via your Smashboard application, or centralised messaging dashboard. When you send a message to all or individual members via Smashboard, your message will appear in that direct conversation only for the individual/s receiving that message.

An image depicting Fabrik's Messaging functionality. — Fabrik's Messaging screen

Find out more about how Conversations and Channels work and how you can create and configure them yourself using the Community Centre community management dashboard.

Step 3: Consider specific engagement tactics

Now that your app environment is ready for engagement, leveraging your app to support your business strategy becomes easier.

When thinking about how to effectively engage your audience, consider how to promote what is coming up in your on-air broadcast and what would entice your app audience to keep coming back.

There are a number of different tactics you can use that are related to a two-pronged approach of using both events like campaigns, and ongoing engagement initiatives.

Ongoing Engagement

Regular Features - use your direct Messaging group to let your audience know about upcoming shows or interviews to ensure engagement on your Fabrik-powered live stream, and capitalise on your most popular features by throwing forward to them in the app.
Shows - consider adding show-specific conversations or channels for your most popular shows and invite your presenters/DJs to post in them. You could also get listeners involved by asking them to send you their messages or voice notes before the show, to be played out on air.
Community Chat - institute a general Community Chat where your community can come together to talk about topics they're interested in!

An image depicting a Community Chat conversation. — This is what a Community Chat conversation could look like in your app!

Campaigns

Exclusive Content and/or Special Offers - use your app to share content your audience won't be able to find anywhere else, and/or partner with advertisers to offer exclusive deals only available via the app.
Competitions - use fun competitions, quizzes and games to give your audience multiple opportunities to re-enter your app.

To truly leverage the app experience in ways that your other digital channels might not be able to deliver, consider how to integrate some of these unique features into your execution:

1. Push notifications (or messages that pop up on the home/lock screen of an individual's device) are a great way to invite engagement into the app, and you can configure each of your Messaging groups to either Notify by Default or not.

An image depicting a push notification, — An example of a push notification

2. Podcasts - record on-air moments (competition segments, interviews or recurring features) as a podcast, and send a message or push notification to let your audience know there's a new podcast that's been published.

3. Billboards - add app billboards for an additional awareness component around your ongoing programme initiatives and campaigns.

4. Pop-up message group - easily add topical messaging groups into your app around specific events or topics to stimulate engagement amongst your audience.

Step 4: Identify & empower key role-players from other departments

To ensure the success of your new app engagement strategy, it's important to consider how it impacts your colleagues in other departments.

Ask, how does this addition to the overall digital strategy impact other teams and, just as important, how does your app engagement strategy translate into ways that other teams can contribute and win?

These initiatives may include training and education on how the app impacts on other departments, and how their own business strategy can benefit from this.

Key to this is the continual promotion of the app via the below channels.

Programming/On-air - ensure the on-air team are informed as to how they should be inviting listeners to your app, and empower them with scripts and live-reads that can be easily incorporated into their shows.

Marketing - empower your colleagues in the Marketing team with information about the app they can share on your social platforms i.e. highlighting app functionality, topical Messaging groups or exclusive content.

Promotions - ensure the team/s working on campaigns within your organisation know exactly how to include the app in the execution of campaigns, i.e. using app-based calls-to-action or tracking the impact of the campaign using keywords set up in Smashboard's Campaign Manager.

Sales - if you're engaging with the Sales team in your organisation, offer to take them through your new app engagement strategy so they're aware of how to leverage these tactics and benefits in their Sales pitches.

The variety of ways Fabrik adds value to your organisation. — The ways Fabrik adds value to your organisation

Step 5: Report back on your engagement initiatives to obtain buy-in

The last step in the implementation of your new app engagement strategy is to let your stakeholders and colleagues know how you're doing!

Fabrik makes this easy by visualising all your audience engagement and live-streaming data within the Metrics application, which you can easily access and incorporate into your reporting, to assure stakeholders that what you're doing is having an impact.