Have you ever wondered why customer engagement is so important? You can have the best product or content in the world, but if no one engages with that content, it won’t do you any good. For better or worse, engagement is king, especially online customer engagement. And if you are a small or medium-sized business owner looking for new customers and leads, engaging those potential customers is one of the most important things you can do. Here are our 8 tips, strategies, and an action plan for engaging your potential customers.
1. Produce Quality Web Content
Want potential customers to engage with your business online? Your business will have to offer something interesting to engage with. Even your biggest fans won’t spend time engaging with your content if that content isn’t interesting. Before you worry about all of the small details of upping your client engagement skills, and apply the rest of the tips in this post, make sure that you have something worthwhile for your potential customers to engage with.
2. Follow-up on Blog Posts
If you want people to engage with your blog posts and other web content, you have to engage with it yourself. Meaning you have to follow-up on the things you post, and show an interest both in your own content and in the people who react to it. If people make comments on your blog posts or social media posts promoting your blog, respond to them! And if you have a popular post that leaves some questions unanswered, make sure to write a follow-up post for anyone interested. The worst thing you can to encourage engagement with potential customers to post things on your blog and then forget about them altogether.
3. Treat your Emails like Conversations
If you already have an email list built, understand that everyone on that list is a potential customer. And if you don’t have an email list, this tip applies equally to one-off emails and outreach emails that land in the inboxes of anyone viewing your site. Make sure that the types of emails that come from your business are structured like a conversation. Ask for customer’s feedback, and incorporate it. Take a tone that, if not casual, is fun and light enough to make your emails worth reading. Just never ever treat an email as a chance to lecture potential customers. Unless you don’t want them to engage with your business.
4. Up your Social Media Game
There are a ton of resources out there worth checking out about getting your social media accounts in line, so we won’t go into too much depth here. Just remember that your social media accounts are one of the most direct and reliable ways for you to engage with potential customers. So use it, and do some research about doing it well.
5. Use More Pictures
No matter how you use the internet, you should be using pictures. Does your business have social media accounts on all the biggest platforms? Make sure that your profile and cover photos are good, and try posting photos regularly to up your engagement, including activities that you are doing as a company. Have a newsletter through your site? You better be incorporating imagery into whatever you send out. Whether you use stock photos or original pieces, that old adage is true: a picture tells a thousand words. So make sure that you are using high-quality imagery in everything your business does.
6. Craft Headlines with Care
Writing email subject lines, social media post headlines, or blog post titles are easy. But writing them well takes some care. If you want people to engage with your content, make sure that your headlines are well crafted and attention-grabbing. Again, there is a well-discussed science to creating good headlines, so we won’t get too into it here. Just remember that if you want your content to spark engagement, it needs to be crafted with care. And your headlines especially can’t be phoned in or thrown together.
7. Think about SEO
SEO, or “search engine optimization,” is one of the most important things that you need to keep in mind when hoping to up the engagement of your potential customers. Why? Because with the right SEO practices, people who really want and need your business’s services and products will be landing on your sites. People who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer are more likely to engage with your content, and more likely to become long term customers. If you are a small business owner with not enough time and too much to do, its probably worth your time to invest in some help for your website’s SEO. It’s that important, in driving engagement and in your business’s overall success.
8. Don’t Give Up
We started off this guide by reminding you that good content doesn’t matter if no one engages with it. But if you keep producing quality material, the engagement will come. As long as you don’t quit.
If you need further help with your SEO strategies to increase your online customer engagement, give us a call!
