Attracting an audience to your website and social media is a great first step in your marketing strategy. But the next step is no less important, and it is, of course, engaging your audience and getting those people to stick around and become your loyal clients.
Audience engagement is a very important part of digital marketing today. It is no longer enough to create a beautiful website, write amazing content, and see what happens. Instead, you need to build an audience that likes to engage with you, your platforms, and most importantly, your products or services.
So, what can you do to entice your audience and boost engagement? In our article, we’ve listed the most effective ways to do that and mentioned the tools to help you with these tasks.
#1 Add More High-Quality Visuals to Your Content
We all know that visuals are much more entertaining to look at than a large chunk of text, and they have the power to draw people in like a magnet. The stats talk for themselves: within three days of reading something, people remember only 20% of it. But, add a relevant image, and the retention rate grows to as much as 65%. And colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.
Source: Gate39media
But not all brands are investing enough resources into creating high-quality visuals for their content. The quality is what people notice at first glance and decide whether to give you their precious attention or skip to something else. 94% of first impressions relate to your site’s web design and bring you the most conversions. So be sure to create a visual strategy for your videos, images, and infographics either with your in-house designers or hired professionals. It will be well worth the investment.
Tools
Visme, Venngage, and Canva for making beautiful infographics.
Envato for creative assets and smart design templates.
#2 Boost Engagement with Interactive Flipbooks
Interactive content sees 52.6% more engagement than static content, with buyers spending an average of 8.5 minutes viewing static content items and 13 minutes looking at interactive content items. Along with videos, GIF animation, interactive quizzes and games, online flipbooks are becoming more and more popular. No wonder! Because a flipbook can serve as a one-stop shop for many of your marketing tasks, such as creating and hosting interactive content, generating leads, tracking performance, and more. So if you haven’t tried making flipbooks yet, that’s your sign to do that.
Tools
FlippingBook helps you create an enticing reading experience with interactive flipbooks. Such digital documents are engaging, informative, and fresh to the eye, so they are sure to drive your readers’ attention on your website, social media, newsletter, and any other channel. This way, flipbooks allow you to reach a wider audience and even increase traffic to your website.
As far as tracking your flipbook performance is concerned, FlippingBook’s advanced analytics helps you get actionable data about your readers. Equipped with these smart metrics, you can deliver the most valuable knowledge to your audience and make your content work more efficiently for your brand.
#3 Engage On-Site via Live Chatbots
Your site visitors expect you to talk to them and answer their questions day and night no matter the time zones. Adding a chatbot to your website can be a good way to always be there for your leads and customers. Therefore, consider building a chatbot for the website to serve more clients with fewer resources and efforts—unlike human beings, the chatbot needs no salary and works 24/7.
A chatbot usually functions as a pop-up window on web pages and offers a quick way of directing questions to the company’s representatives. An online chat is a great alternative to phone calls or emails—about 41% of customers say they prefer real-time customer service via live chat over other methods. And this number is only expected to grow in the coming years.
Source: Tidio
Tools
Intercom, Zendesk Support Suite, Drift, and Tidio are just a few of the many live chat tools that allow you to add a chatbot to your site and track visitor interactions.
#4 Talk and Listen to Your Audience on Social Media
Be on every social media platform where your audience is—this is the key to building trust and strong communication with your readers and clients. Social media is all about communication, so be ready to listen to your followers’ feedback and be always willing to have a conversation with your followers. Your audience’s time is incredibly valuable and taking a moment to respond shows that you care.
Another good strategy is called social listening when you find existing conversations about your brand (or even your industry) and join in. It helps boost engagement significantly and reach a wider audience. To give you an example, see how Starbucks keeps it funny and chatty on Twitter, responding to their customers.
Tools
Sprout Social, HubSpot, Buzzsumo, and Snaplytics are social media tools that cover such tasks as social media scheduling, engagement reports, analytics, and brand monitoring.
#5 Optimize Your Website for Better Engagement
Well-optimized sites with superior user experience can have 400% higher conversion rates. Here’s where staying a perfectionist is good advice: never stop optimizing your site, follow the latest trends, and schedule regular page speed and SEO tests. There’s always something you can do better! Check out the main things to keep your attention on:
- Optimize for fast loading times. Website speed is an often-overlooked element of a website but we couldn’t stress the importance of a fast-loading and efficient website more. 70% of consumers say that page speed affects their willingness to buy from a business.
- Make your website mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendliness is critical as mobile and social media shopping continues to grow. Design your site to look as good on a phone or tablet as it does on a computer screen. With 74% of people more likely to return to your site if it’s mobile-friendly, you want to ensure your site looks great on mobile devices.
- Optimize for search engines. SEO is one of the most powerful marketing tools on the Internet. It allows you to work on increasing both the quality and the quantity of website traffic, as well as the exposure of your brand, through organic search engine results.
Tools
Page Speed Insights for testing your website speed.
Mobile-Friendly Test for testing how easily a visitor can use your website on a mobile device.
Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz for SEO check and optimization.
#6 Use Smart Recommendations and Interlinking
Interlinking is a useful practice when you add hyperlinks that point to other pages on your website. It allows Google to understand the structure of your website better and display your content in search results in the most relevant way. For your visitors, internal links can also be very helpful—they serve as smart recommendations that allow the readers to learn more about your products and services. This way, you can increase the likelihood that your prospects will linger on your site, enhancing engagement and providing you with valuable data on what content they need and like.
Tools
Ahrefs, Free Website Analyzer, Screaming Frog SEO Spider Website Crawler for auditing your website and improving onsite SEO.
#7 Host Contests and Giveaways
Engage your followers and gain new ones with a contest or giveaway on your social media channels. Boost engagement by making a condition for entry: it can be a comment, sharing a post, liking your page, or tagging you on a photo. For example, see how JD Sports introduces its giveaway contest on Twitter.
Contests and giveaways help you get new followers as people will hear about the contest from family and friends. This will also let you promote your new products and services.
Tools
SweepWidget, Woorise, Wishpond, and Rafflecopter are tools that allow you to create various contests and giveaways.
We hope that all the mentioned ways and tools to boost your audience engagement will help you increase sales, get more clients, and grow your business.
