Studies show that a consumer visiting a website forms their opinion in less than one second (50 milliseconds to be exact!). That’s certainly not a lot of time to create a positive impression and captivate your audience.
Audience engagement is crucial for the success of a website and the best way to generate revenue. But how do you do that with so little time? Luckily there are several strategies for engaging the audience by making your website a positive experience for everyone. All with just a few tweaks.
Here are our top seven tips you can implement today to improve the audience engagement on your website!
1. Optimize Performance
The quickest way to lose a website visitor is to make them wait for the website to load. Everyone has experienced the frustration of waiting for a website’s content to load and how annoying that can be. It’s so undesirable that most people won’t do it at all.
Instead, they’ll just click away and try something else. Leaving your website behind.
Making sure your website is optimized for quick loading times is the first step in hooking the audience in. Once you’ve ensured that they won’t have to wait around, you can focus on the website design and the actual content since they’ll be more likely to actually stick around to see it!
2. Locate Pain Points
As you work on web development and improvement, it’s important to regularly simulate your customer’s experience to locate pain points. Where does the navigation get confusing? Is it easy to find what they’re looking for? Do they get stuck anywhere? All of these questions can help you make the best experience possible.
Many companies prefer to use an AI source, like decibel.com, to help locate these pain points. Programs like these can simulate the customer experience quickly and efficiently to get you the information as soon as possible.
Once you’ve located the pain points a customer is experiencing you can experiment with alternative solutions to find the best relief.
3. Generate Opportunities
It’s pretty difficult to have positive audience engagement when there aren’t any opportunities available for any interaction. You have to generate those engagement points all throughout your website.
Website engagement comes in a variety of ways, with no one size fits all solution for every business. These engagement opportunities should feel natural and related to your business and products. It could look like signing up for a newsletter, leaving reviews or ratings, watching video content, or many others.
The point is to give your audience a variety of options to connect with you through your website. Don’t focus on one area and expect spectacular results.
4. Tie in All Platforms
Along the same lines, linking all of your different platforms together is one of the key strategies for engaging the audience. We all know how important social media is these days and the huge impact it has on digital marketing, so it’s important to lean into those platforms as well.
It should be easy for your website visitors to be able to find (and follow!) all of your various social media platforms from your site.
But, more than that, they should all be interconnected to make one larger experience for your audience. The visitors should be able to move seamlessly between them all and find you wherever they are.
5. Offer Incentives
One of the easiest ways to bump up your audience engagement is to offer incentives for those types of actions. Everyone loves a reward or even the option to possibly have a reward. So lean into that natural human desire and draw your audience in.
The incentives you offer don’t have to be elaborate or complicated, they just have to be enough to spark the desire for action.
This could look like getting entered into a giveaway for leaving a review or a discount code for signing up for a newsletter. These simple types of rewards will boost your audience’s engagement and lead to further engagement as well. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
6. Focus on the Brand Story
Anyone in business knows how critical the brand story is to the overall success of the company. It’s what draws a customer in and binds them to you for the future. The brand identity is what customers come to know and love, which is why a focus on branding is crucial for the most audience engagement.
If a customer comes to your website for the first time and doesn’t recognize the story being told, they’re not going to stick around.
It should be blindingly obvious that the website they’re visiting is the same as the rest of the things they know from the company. When the customer feels that they’re more comfortable to participate in engagement opportunities throughout the site.
7. Keep it Simple
Sometimes companies who are looking to increase their audience engagement make things more complicated than they need to be. And complications drive customers away quicker than almost anything else.
Everything about moving through the website should be as simple as possible; making it easy to find the information they need or purchase the products they’re interested in. An audience member shouldn’t have to work to engage or interact with your website.
And don’t forget that more than 5 billion people across the world have smart devices, so optimizing your website for mobile use is critical to meeting this simplicity goal!
Increasing Audience Engagement Quickly
It’s the goal of every company to develop a relationship with their audience that leads to increased revenue, or at least it should be! One of the best ways to accomplish that goal is to increase audience engagement across all platforms, but especially through the company website.
The more audience engagement you have, the more you can get to know your customer and make decisions based on that knowledge to help further your goals. And also the more the customer gets to know your brand. It’s a win-win situation.
If you’re interested in learning more about business, tech, social media, and how they work together, check out our other articles today!
