You’ve worked hard to set up your business. You’re confident that your products and services can deliver. And you’re driving a fair amount of traffic to your website. With all these things in place, have you taken the time to actually map out how to best engage your audience?

User engagement is a critical part of your overall marketing strategy. Not only does it help you establish an open line of communication between customers, but it also helps boost your SEO rankings as well as brand awareness. So, what can you do to boost engagement with your audience? Here are some actionable strategies you can implement:

1. Incentivize engagement

Everyone loves freebies. And when it comes to building regular engagement on your site, you can use this to push people to comment on your posts, or like and share it on social media. Freebies can incentivize customers to join discussion threads, answer survey questionnaires, or install apps.

It doesn’t have to be anything expensive or costly. You can try offering exclusive content that you develop yourself—an ebook or a white paper. You can even offer a free trial of your product or service as way to show your appreciation.

Not only does it spur engagement from your users, but it also helps build customer loyalty and makes your audience coming back to your website.

2. Offer live chat options

Implementing a live chat platform on your website is a great and easy way for your brand to directly reach out to customers and for customers to reach out to you. It’s also a very effective way of preventing your users from simply bouncing off your website when they feel like their questions can’t be answered.

In addition, customers actually prefer to use live chat over calling customer service numbers and being put on hold when they need customer support.

3. Make it easy for your audience to share your posts

Make sure your posts have easy to see social sharing buttons at the end. This basically takes the tedium out of readers having to cut and paste the link and logging on to whatever social media platform they have to use just so they can share a post

Social sharing buttons make it so much simpler for users to share something from your website. With a simple click, customers can easily upload an article, image, infographic, or any piece of content they found interesting onto their own feeds. 

When people share your posts, your social media standing becomes better. A solid social media following is a great way to establish credibility among users and potential customers.

4. Check in on your audience once in a while

It’s good to check in on your audience and find out whether or not they are happy with every point of interaction they have with your business. This goes well beyond the quality of product or service you’re able to deliver. You should look into whether they are satisfied with how easy it is to navigate your website; if their questions are answered by your customer service team, if your articles and content are actually relevant to their needs.

The best way to approach this is by polling or conducting a quick survey. Not only is it a good way to engage your audience, but it also highlights that you care enough to find out exactly how you can make things better for them.

Bottom line?

There’s a lot of ways you can boost customer engagement. The above four approaches are easily some of the more actionable strategies that you can readily implement. If you want to really take your engagement to the next level, get in touch with us and find out how we can help. Also, feel free to share any other techniques you have tried, in comments.