The purpose of any website is to engage your audience. You don’t want people to visit your site, read the information you’ve provided, and then just leave. You want them to call you, leave comments on your blog posts, follow you on social media, etc. But how to do this?
If you’ve been struggling with audience engagement, don’t worry. It’s actually pretty easy to improve this, and before long you can have a website that is more like an active community than just a group of static pages. Here are 5 tips to get you started:
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Focus on Quality Over Quantity
One of the first things you should focus on is the content of your website. Specifically, you should focus on providing high-quality content, rather than an abundance of content. Many website owners, in an attempt to appear more often in search results, will create dozens or even hundreds of articles for their site as quickly as they can. However, when someone reads these articles, it’s quite clear that they were rushed out, as they provide little-to-no value.
A better strategy is to create less content but to ensure this content is of high quality. High-quality content will not only do better in search results in the long run, but it will keep your audience engaged. Think about it from the perspective of your audience. Which would keep your attention more, an article that answers every question you have about a topic or one that barely scratches the surface on one aspect of it?
To create high-quality content, try to answer every question you can think of related to the topic. Then, write the article using the voice of the customer. Include stats and references to give your writing some credibility and to provide your audience with additional information. There’s a lot that goes into creating quality content, but if you can keep the focus on what your target audience is likely searching for, you’ll be off to a good start.
Encourage Interactions
The next thing you can do to have better audience engagement is simply ask for it. It’s pretty easy to do this. At the end of your blog post, create a call to action that says something like “Call us today for more information” or “Leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts.” You could also include a contact form and ask people to send you a message with their feedback or questions.
Sometimes all people need is a little nudge. So whether it’s asking them to share their thoughts in the comment section at the bottom of the page, or asking them to reach out to you on social media, go ahead and encourage the interactions you’re looking for.
Use Different Types of Content
One thing that will certainly drive down audience engagement is if the entire page they’re looking at is just a wall of text. Even if you write amazing content, you need to break it up with other types of content. This will not only make your writing easier to read, but it will help you connect with people who process information better from other mediums.
For instance, if you have a written tutorial on your website, consider adding in a video demonstrating the steps. Or, if you have a bunch of stats you want to talk about, use an infographic to get the word out, rather than a long blog post. Another option is to add a popup survey form or poll to your website. This gives users an opportunity to interact with your site directly and can provide you with some valuable feedback at the same time.
By changing up the content within a blog post, or just throughout your site, you’ll keep things from becoming stale. This will give your users different things to look at and consider, helping to better engage them.
Add a Chatbot
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One of the latest trends in internet marketing is the use of chatbots. By now you’ve probably come across one of these on some other site – you enter in, and in one of the corners a little box pops up, asking how they can help you today. Some people prefer the personal touch of talking to someone, and a chatbot helps to mimic this experience. A user can type in their questions – which instantly gets them engaged – and get an answer right away.
Using a chatbot helps to keep your users engaged since they are sitting there performing an action rather than just reading your screen. Best of all, chatbots are typically easy to set up and a low cost to maintain. If you don’t have a chatbot on your site yet, it may just be the thing you need to drive up engagement.
Speed Up the Site
Finally, the last tip for improving audience engagement is to speed up your website. No matter how many of the tips above you implement, if your site runs too slowly, they won’t have the desired effect. You could have some great content on your website, but if it all takes too long to load, your users will just leave before you get a chance to engage them.
To speed up your site, there are a few simple things you can do. First, check out your server. If you’re running on a shared server, you may want to switch to a private one to get a faster response time. Your server plays a large role in determining how fast the site loads for your users, so make sure it’s as fast as can be.
After that, work on simplifying your website. Remove any plugins that you don’t really need and optimize your images for the web. It may not seem like much, but each millisecond you can shave off your load time will help to keep your users engaged. To learn more about improving your site speed, you can use this tool from Google.
Improved Audience Engagement Isn’t Rocket Science
As you can see, it isn’t too difficult to start getting your audience more engaged. All it takes is speeding up your site a bit, focusing on your content, and maybe giving your audience something to do. You don’t need some big interactive game to get your audience engaged – a few simple tweaks and additions can go a long way.
Whether you’re looking to increase sales or drive up traffic so you can sell your website, hopefully, this guide was able to give you some ideas on how to better engage your audience. Audience engagement is a great goal for every website, so start implementing the tips above as soon as you can. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll find that audience engagement wasn’t that difficult after all, and that your website has become the interactive place you were after.
About the author
Marcus Svensson is responsible for the Growth of Albacross, a B2B lead generation platform, with previous experience as a founder and background in Mathematics from Stanford. Albacross is one of the top lead generation tools in Europe today and growing with hundreds of new companies every day. For best lead generation visit albacross.com
