Visitor Engagement: The Key to Conversion

You’ve got a great design, and your site exudes professionalism. That’s a great start. But trust me—it’s not enough.

Many websites are making a great presentation, but they’re missing out on a critical factor to convert more visitors into customers: engagement.

Engagement is getting your visitors to actually do something while on your site. Engagement helps your visitors commit to moving forward—with a sale.

Most websites suck because the content is shallow and not engaging. It generates no emotion and moves the visitor nowhere.

To fix that, you will design a better visitor engagement strategy. Many other areas of business are into engagement strategy too, from shopping mall and retail store design, to urban planning, to software UX design. Engagement is very important and can significantly improve leads and revenue.

While the website traffic you’re getting from SEO and PPC channels is wonderful, it’s useless if you can can’t generate the customer action you need. This post describes in great detail how you can power up your content and site design to make your site more “sticky.

Let’s Explore Website Engagement (and social engagement)

You’ll enjoy discovering how to rearrange your content strategy and prospect journey to convert more leads and raise your revenue.

You’ll be able to peer into the depths of customer engagement strategy. This one improvement, might be the most important thing you’ll do in 2018.

Do we have to do it all in EPIC fashion? No, that’s just my branding thing. You’ll be able to pick out the most relevant engagement tactics and fill the holes to make your content engagement and converations super pleasant and easy to consume. You can come back to this post forever and I’ll have new info for you.

Engagement is an Exploratory Process Leading to a Conversation

When you hear the word engagement, you might think of videos or chatbots and something interactive. Actually, engagement is a process of creating a conversation or experience with your visitors, so it’s actually what’s happening via the content or media.

Content won’t do it by itself, even if the content is very, very good. I have plenty of experience in creating deep, informative, helpful, sharable content and I still lost prospects. Even good content can fail if the engagement funnel process isn’t clear and achieve the conversion goal.

Even the smallest interruption in the conversation, could end it. That’s very frustrating when you’ve worked so hard on your copy and visuals. To do engagement strategy well, you need to really know your customers. Study them, meet them, ask questions, take notes, get feedback, and understand their views and pain points very intimately.

That’s the only way you can optimize this website content process to convince them. And convincing them is more than making the solution laser clear andhelpful. Making them feel good is the last phase of a process, which may be complicated. That’s why an engagement consultant might be in your future.

Focus Means Not Confusing Them

As many startups, freelancers and SMBs discover the hard way is that visitor engagement needs a specific goal. As a digital marketing specialist, I’ve fallen into the trap myself by being too many things.

What the customer actually wants is a clear vision of the solution to their pain, and a direct route to it. Offering multiple, value-added paths could confuse them.

That’s why many companies just present “their stuff” on their site and let the visitor decide for themselves. Given how competitive the market is now, that’s not sufficient anymore.

The Visitor and The Customer Journey

The visitor’s journey begins on Google. They have intent. They’re following a path to find a solution. They’re looking for a practical entry point, one they can comprehend, and then building their confidence. If your UVP or the goal is transparent, undertandable, and inviting, they’ll continue their exploration.

"The goal/solution must be apparent and clear in their terms or the conversation will end"

If they leave, it could be your content itself, lack of a clear solution, or perhaps how it’s laid out to be experienced. It’s this on site experience that may be the problem.

What I find with many sites and on those I’ve worked with, is that there is no invitation to a conversation. Lacking that invitation, visitors feel the company really isn’t sincerley interested in their needs. The conversation afterall, is to explore the visitor’s needs.

For us marketers, the engagement is about finding out what they need and then clarfying and customizing our solution to them.

How Do Your Customers Feel?

Engagement is a general term marketers created to describe how people feel about your website and your content. Engaged means they like being on your site, find value in it, and are pursuing the path to become your customer.

Engagement is the New Scorecard

And if they are already your customer, highly engaging content will help to keep them away from competitors. And remember, your customers are always searching and interacting on social media. Engagement is good business sense and ultimately big profits.

Strangely, so little is available online about this important topic and how to do it.

Prospect Engagement is Critical to Sales Conversion

Customers don’t buy until they have a clear, positive feeling of confidence. So engagement is a process of creating that feeling of positive confidence. Engagement isn’t empty interaction and clicking, it’s purposeful movement like exploring, learning, assessing and deciding.

Engagement builds emotion, buyer intent, and sales velocity. It’s the most important element in marketing yet very few business people want to know about it. It gets little respect even among marketers who are hard pressed to create an engagement plan or strategy, or to measure engagement performance.

The reason engagement was rated 3rd in importance in this survey below is because marketers are confused by engagement and how to quantify it. Aren’t lead generation and brand awareness hollow goals if the audience isn’t engaged?

So why don’t we start solving this audience engagement challenge right now?

How to Improve Visitor Engagement

This post offers 22 useful tips, some infographics, examples, and more insight into powering up your new website engagement strategy below.

However, engagement shouldn’t be a hackathon. Hacking is in vogue yet that could reveal everyone has no plan or strategy and are making unwise choices. Better results come from a good plan and a powerful engagement strategy. Then you can hack your improvements.

Understanding visitor/customer engagement can make your job more fun, increase customer retention and grow your sales revenue for many years ahead. It shouldn’t take long to see results but you’re likely to see massive improvements over the years ahead. Have faith, you can do it.

What if Engagement is the New Focus of Your Website?

Why aren’t websites and social pages engaging? Because everyone uses them for “show and tell.” But websites shouldn’t be an Amazon shopping page or like a museum where there’s no touching and no talking.

Your product and service pages are probably the focus of your website currently. What might be better is your very best content such as an informative blog that makes visitors feel they will solve their need and then contact you for the next phase of becoming your customer.

You can deliver engagement via a great video, amazing product pages, or a blog post with data, using compelling facts and stories. Even if visitors are visiting from other channels such as Facebook, or Pinterest, or Linkedin, immersion in your epic quality content is likely the clincher. Poor quality posts however can destroy your credibility so always — quality first.

Connecting with Your Visitors

Videos, podcasts, Facebook pages can be engaging if they provide real value and if they align with the prospect’s problem. The challenge of course is that each customer has a different problem and need. Your content strategy would then create a different engagement path for each major type of prospect.

Okay, so now you know you’re going to have to put your thinking cap on and map out these paths of fulfillment for all the people coming to your website and social pages. The goal is to peak their intent and create a 1 to 1 relationship.

Regardless of the media channel, we have to create an emotional commitment within them to connect with us. Depending on the nature of your service or products, you may need to find to find some simple pain point to make an initial conversation. That simple conversation piece builds a bridge between you and them. It could be a common experience (e.g., a shared travel destination) you mentioned that gives them the emotional justifciation for continuing to read your website. One more such connection, and they’ll pick up the phone!

One thing about Facebook is that it seems to put those events, people, places first and foremost, rather than the business side of things. Avid social media users seem to excel at conversations.

“Companies and brands need to recognize that social media is the best way to engage their customers. What other media allows them to have one-on-one conversations and address customer service in real time? Social and blogging done right, is an opportunity to show the human side of your brand and generate emotion. Take the time to develop a relationship with customers and use your social media soap box effectively”.

Video can be engaging. As you can see in this short video, the Realtor gives a spontaneous “on the go” tour of available homes for sale in the La Jolla California area. And on the go busy buyers like that approach.

Engagement is the strategic process of connecting with visitors/customers on an emotional level and making them feel that they are fulfilling their purpose.

Once Fully Immersed in Your Content You Can Gently Move Them Forward

Once they’ve filled their imagination with design possibilities, you can move them onto kitchen layout plans, materials, and your pain-free construction solutions.

So now they’ve gone through a solution experience and are ready to ask questions, check your credibility, and contact you. The solution experience helps to focus their thoughts and emotions in the direction you need.

You’ve built an expectation of fulfillment and they’re starting to feel emotionally ready to go through with a kitchen reno.

Their next action is to resolve their post-purchase anxiety, get the price, consider financing, choose the right kitchen design/features, and arrange the date for renovation.

That’s a lot of issues and tasks. Fortunately, your website content made it easy for them to progress from beginning to end. You painted the picture they wanted, resolved anxieties, and created focus for them. That created one single pleasant emotion and that’s what everyone wants before they push the buy button.

2 Aspects to Engagement: your Content and your Interaction.

Content:

• your homepage, blogs, tweets, videos, pictures, data, etc is the experience and the your brand promise. If you can somehow discover what it is your visitors actually want to experience online (learning, purchasing, certainty, validation, confidence building, esteem, empowerment, getting rid of conflicts and problems) you might be able to research and develop richer content for them to read or view.
• They expect content that is relevant and significant to them and which is somehow personalized to their unique perspective and needs. The term significance is important to ponder.

Interaction:

• this begins with scrolling, reading and clicking, and progresses to them using their imagination and making some calculations
• the next is to move them to content that creates excitement, surprise, delight, and awe, and it should have a good mix of emotion-laden content that suggests promise of satisfaction. That’s why pics of kids, pets, meals, birthday events, and construction workers doing their wok makes sense. The next interaction should be with a real human being.

Monitor your Engagement

Assess your engagement success via your Google Analytics reports. See which links they’re clicking on in your page, where they go next on your site, how long they read the page, how many pages they visit, and whether they’re returning to your site.

If your engagement is low, you need to discover which of these root causes are suppressing it:

• weak value proposition
• ugly website with some unpleasant material
• poor flow to the copywriting and other content
• low quality, poorly qualified visitors
• ranking on the wrong keyword phrases
• hard to read and navigate content
• negative or boring tone to content — too stiff and unimaginative
• content too deep for shallow audiences – have some light stuff for them
• irrelevant value proposition – they don’t want your stuff
• lack of content – you have to have something for them to read or view
• poor quality content – get a content strategist/writer/videographer to help
• lack of credibility – your site, credentials and linkedin profile may be hurting you
• lack of color and zest in your content – find something interesting — curate some content
• lack of personal presence in your content – why aren’t you in your content?
• lack of engaging stories to tell – you need to get out and about, travel, network and engage with others yourself so take some time out for those activities.