Drive traffic to your website. But even if you do, you’ve won only half of the battle. You’ll find it more important to make sure your traffic brings results. Your visitors should hopefully subscribe to your newsletter or blog. And even better purchase your services or products.
If that doesn’t happen, your site won’t meet its full potential. And may fail to generate any ROI.
Those who effectively market content are able to engage their readers and leave them wanting to come back again and again for more. This drives brand recognition and understanding of the company and shows that that, regardless of what product it sells, it has something to offer them. They create something that is interesting in and of itself, regardless of what it may also be promoting.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can increase your conversions by doing a better job engaging users on your site.
Ideally, we want users to:
- View more pages before leaving.
- Spend more time on your site.
- Take certain actions you want them to take before leaving.
- Share content with their friends.
- Leave any kind of traces behind, preferably their name and email, allowing you to catch back up with them to finally turn them into paying customers
6 Ways to Improve Content Engagement on Your Site
Below are some simple – yet quite ingenuous – ideas you could use to engage users when they visit your website, no technical knowledge or additional training required.
1. Install a Chatbot
Artificial Intelligence is changing on-page interaction at a rapid rate. It can help you reach out to site users the moment they need help. It can also help them find a solution to their problem. You don’t even have to hire a developer to create a chatbot any more.
Alter helps you to easily integrate a smart chatbot with your website marketing. There’s no configuration required. Simply install Alter code and you are done. While providing answers to user problem in real time, Alter will direct them into the conversion funnel.
Image: Alter
2. Tweak Your Calls-to-Action
Conversions can easily be increased from within content by making Calls-to-Action a fundamental part of the article. This means the CTAs should not interrupt visitors’ reading. In-content CTAs should in fact hook page users up by promising answers and providing solutions.
Hubspot is a good example of how to blend CTAs into content that is tightly related. An article on writing professional biographies may, for example, have an optin form linking to a list of templates that can be downloaded.
TextOptimizer is a great platform that can help you optimize your in-content CTAs. Text Optimizer contains a section for “Action Words” that will help you craft more actionable content and pick good words to trigger action:
Image: TextOptimizer
3. Set up Exit Intent Popups
While I usually advise against intrusive interstitials (which can also cause Google organic search visibility issues), exit intent popups – when they are set up well – may be not a bad idea. They only show up when a user is believed to be ready to move on and they can include some convincing incentive winning the visitor’s heart back.
PayKickstart is the only platform I know that has exit intent popups setup just right: They always seem to show up when they make sense.
Image: PayKickstart
Apart from exit intent popups, PayKickstart offers more engagement optimization features, like form auto-completion, one-click upsells, and easy retargeting pixel integration.
4. Create Quizzes and Polls
You need to understand your potential customers’ needs before you are able to to cater to them effectively. It is very easy to create a customer feedback poll or popup. A quiz will enable you to generate feedback on how your business is performing while gaining insights into what customers are looking for.
People tend to love answering quizzes and most won’t mind taking some time to fill one out. This will help you decrease the site’s bounce rate. Besides, if you ask for their email address before revealing the results )optionally), you can grow your email list at the same time.
SurveyAnyplace is a nice affordable survey creation and hosting platform that also offers all kinds of templates that they have found to engage the audience best.
Image: SurveyAnyplace
5. Re-Target to Re-Engage
If you are already generating some solid traffic, it may be worthwhile to investigate how you can use digital marketing remarketing (or re-targeting). This can be done in various ways but usually it comes down to displaying ads to previous visitors and customers using Facebook Insights.
When re-targeting, do the following:
- Create a new Facebook ad to target people who visited your site
- Use several different ads. Using a few different sizes or formats of ads, but sticking to a consistent look can help improve the possibility that you’ll draw their attention.
Images: Facebook
Whichever strategy you decide to use for re-targeting and re-engaging, never overdo it. You don’t want to appear to be overly zealous or pushy as this is a sure way to turn customers off.
Bonus: Analyze to Improve
Even if you try all the ideas listed in this article, you won’t be able to properly engage users on your site unless you analyze what actually worked and what didn’t. It is critically important to always analyze your data to adopt your tactics accordingly.
Using tools such as Google Analytics is one option but it can be quite overwhelming. Finteza is a much easier option, although it is freemium. It saves plenty of time allowing you to easily add events for tracking using their WordPress plugin. You can closely monitor all your in-content CTAs measuring which ones attract clicks:
Images: Finteza
This will help you determine which campaigns perform best, and build on that success. As the weak areas will also be highlighted, you can change those to improve user engagement.
Finteza also has a built-in re-targeting algorithm allowing you to customize your ads and CTAs to engage your site return visitors.
Once your website users are engaged, you can start working to convert them into paying customers.
Conclusion
As more and more companies turn to innovative and fresh ways of integrating their products and brands into something that people actually want to see, the demand for not just good, but excellent content marketing becomes increasingly important for smaller companies as well.
However in the age of information overload when consumers are being bombarded with all sorts of content assets and content production exceeds content demand, good content – and even great content – may not be enough. You need to come with new and new ways to surprise your readers and prompt them to engage. I hope the tools above will give you some ideas to play and experiment.
Image: Depositphotos.com