You have only 10 to 20 seconds to capture someone’s attention when they land on your website. If you don’t encourage them to stick around based on what you have posted, then they are going to bounce away.
This results in subpar engagement, which can be extremely damaging to your website and your hope for future engagement. When it comes to marketing your site, you have to keep your user engagement in mind – at all times.
Wondering why? If so, you aren’t alone. Learn more about the importance of proper marketing and what you need to do to encourage customer engagement, here.
Keep in mind, marketing your website is similar to print marketing efforts you may have used in the past. If you don’t create engaging content or an engaging experience, it’s not going to be effective.
Keep reading to learn more.
What is Customer Engagement?
Before diving into why it’s important or how to improve customer engagement on your website, you need to fully understand what it is.
Customer engagement is all about encouraging people who come to your site to interact and share with the experiences created for them. When executed correctly, strong customer engagement strategies can help foster loyalty and brand growth.
If you focus on customer engagement, you are also focused on value creation, rather than revenue extraction. They provide something beyond a great sales pitch. This includes:
- Real-time customer support
- Great content
- A superior end-to-end customer experience
Ready to learn more about customer engagement and how to build it with your marketing efforts? If so, keep reading.
Put Your Marketing Efforts Where Your Prospects Are
Even though industry conferences, email marketing, and digital advertising are all crucial parts of your marketing arsenal, it’s time that you realize that website engagement is just as important for nurturing lead generation.
Why?
Mainly due to potential audience reach.
Keep in mind, in the first stage of a buyer’s journey, which is the awareness stage, then audience volume is at its highest. If you don’t invest plenty of effort to engage your prospects at this point using custom content that grabs and keeps their attention, you may risk losing quite a bit of your audience prior to reaching the next level.
The next level is the middle of the funnel. Also, relevant content can help reduce bounce rates and lead to much higher conversion rates.
Not all Visitors to Your Website are the Same
Can you imagine going to a website and just seeing content that matches your demographics, job function, and industry? Wouldn’t that be amazing?
By using website personalization technology, you can now engage your prospects at a more personal level, using case studies, customized CTAs and even custom text messages. Learn more about custom SMS technology here.
It’s estimated that 67 percent of all prospects find content that’s targeted to their job function is valuable, while 82 percent value content that’s targeted to their particular industry. This shows that people not only want but expect, companies to create content that matches their individual needs and attributes.
Each buyer segment has a particular “DNA” which is made up of location, industry, demographics and more. It’s the responsibility of the marketer to ensure each website visitor receives content that’s aligned with their own DNA. This is what increases the potential for engagement.
Even if you have created a significant amount of content, you may not have the ability to show it to the right potential customers, at the right time. With real-time website personalization, you have the opportunity to provide a customized and targeted experience that will increase your chances of turning a prospect into an actual lead.
How to Use Marketing to Build Customer Engagement
If you are ready to improve your customer engagement strategy using marketing efforts, then keep reading.
Keep Customer Experience as Priority #1
The customer experience you create is imperative because it provides a way to increase advocacy, loyalty, and satisfaction. It has been proven that consumers in the U.S. are willing to pay more for a service or product if a superior customer experience is provided.
Think about the business model in place and how you can improve it to better serve your customers. When do customers need to contact you? What hours should you be available?
Creating a better customer experience will help improve engagement significantly.
Humanize Your Brand
You need to understand that all customers want to feel as though you understand their needs and that they can relate to your brand. While this may be easier for brands that are “more fun” such as Nike or Red Bull than B2B companies and banks, it’s still possible.
You can humanize any business without having to squeeze your brand into some type of contrived persona that won’t resonate with your audience.
Find someone in your organization who is a natural communicator and who is passionate about what you do. Let them become a thought leader and the “voice” of your brand.
As the “voice,” they can create videos, blog and be the face of the company that consumers will recognize and be willing to engage with.
Use Social in New Ways
Social media is the perfect place to let your business “off the leash” a bit. Use these platforms to show your business has a personality and a bit of sass.
By letting a more unique, relatable voice be heard, your customers or potential customers will be more willing and ready to engage with your brand.
Marketing Your Website: Creating Engagement Takes Time and Effort
When you are marketing your website, the best way to build engagement is to keep it top of mind at all times. When you do this, your visitors will take notice.
The good news is, once you figure out what works, you can take advantage of it and use it to ensure continued engagement.
If you found this article interesting, and want more tips, such as tips to create an attractive marketing logo, be sure to check out our blog.
