Engaging Your Audience With Digital Marketing

How To Engage Your Audience With Digital Marketing

 The previous two blogs in our Digital Marketing series explored defining and attracting your audience by researching and using digital strategies such as SEO, PPC and social media to determine and draw in your audience.

The next stage in our digital marketing model is Engage. This is all about how you capture the attention and trust of your prospective customers with the aim of improving and strengthening your brand and company’s reputation once you’ve attracted them to your chosen online destination. Creating valuable relationships using your digital marketing strategy is key to developing your business and ultimately generating a profit.

We may have mentioned before - your customers are the most important element of your business and happy customers are invaluable. You need to be able to captivate new customers and build the relationship you have with your existing customers in order to convert these visits into sales. Your engagement strategy will allow you to be on their radar and this requires successful planning, research and of course engagement.  Our earlier blogs in this series will help you plan and research before you take the next step.

You can engage on your website or on your social media profile and, if researched properly, should spur your audience to participate, share and interact with your business. The content published needs to be interesting and relevant in order to properly appeal to your audience. Your engagement strategy will help you build trust and credibility with your audience so they are intrigued and excited to find out more about you.

Here are some of our favourite ways to engage:

Engaging your audience using your Website

In almost every case, your website the central hub for all your online communications and should contain all the information and content your customers need to make an informed decision about your products and services… and more! The type of content you publish is very important for helping to get that message across!

Website copy

This probably takes up about 90% of your website. Your copy is fundamental to the success of your engagement process! This is where you can really get to selling your products and services to your audience using appealing information. Explain your products and services with jargon free copy so traffic visiting your site from all walks of life are able to understand what you offer and what you’re all about. Too much jargon can put off the visitor especially if they’re not familiar with your products or services.

Downloads

What kind of downloads are available on your site? Downloads are a great way to ‘give something away’ to your audience with relative ease and at a low cost. You could create a simple PDF, a to do list or a step by step guide for them to help accomplish a certain goal or task relating to your business. Just make sure it’s easy to download!

Imagery

Pictures and photographs are a great way to capture the attention of your readers, people like visual. You should consider profiles about your staff or high quality images of your product along with descriptions on your site. Just be careful with the loading time of the images and the quality of them. Too low a resolution will result in poor quality images and very high resolution will take time to load on your site and can affect the overall speed of your site - both not ideal for browsing customers.

Videos

Videos are extremely popular for engaging with your customers and if they’re embedded on your website, they’ll watched. At the same time if a link from your page brings the visitor to your video channel, they’ll be able to see all of your videos which is even better! Convenience is key and it’s easier for your customers to watch a video than read reams of text about your products or services. Videos, if they’re properly optimised with tags and descriptions for VSEO, will also help push your website up the rankings.

Email Marketing

Engaging with your existing database is a great way to increase brand loyalty or new product awareness. Through this email marketing engagement you will attempt to drive traffic to a bespoke page on your website. Setting out clear aims and objectives in the planning stage of your marketing campaigns will help you discover what information really engages your customers and to make the most of the content in the emails you send to your database. You need to create clever, appealing content and call’s to action which motivate the customer to engage by responding or taking action.

Social Media

Your social media profile is a brilliant tool for engaging your audience on a more informal level. Here you are able to share your company information with followers who are able to engage and can increase your reach by redistributing the information you post with their friends and family. Take Facebook for example, it actively encourages sharing and participation with the features installed on the platform such as comment, like, share, review and you can even install different apps on your wall to increase engagement. Social media platforms can also assist your inbound marketing and can provide really in-depth information into your audience by using the insights or analytics provided.

To summarise…

Your engagement strategy is fundamental to the success of your online marketing strategy and doesn’t only apply to online! Put yourself in your customers shoes, you’re going to go with the company that resonates most with you and the company who make the most effort nurturing the relationship you have with them.

You need to integrate an engagement strategy across all your marking communications both offline and online. Consider creating a ‘persona’ and by imagining what type of customer you want to attract to your business you can figure out what engagement appeals to them - what way do they like to communicate?

Engagement is already difficult to pull off so don’t make it difficult by being intrusive and interrupting the customer journey. Pop up’s and home image take overs have their place but don’t over do it. You want your customer to contact you because they’re interested in what you have to offer, not because that irritating live chat wouldn’t stop popping up so they stuck their email address in to make it go away.

The Keep It Simple & Straightforward, (KISS), principle is probably the best way to go with your engagement strategy, simple and to the point will help your customers learn faster and the easier you make it for them to engage with you the more likely they will!