No matter what your online marketing strategy involves, there’s one goal you should always have in mind: audience engagement.
It might sound like a high-flown concept, but all engagement really refers to is people spending time with your brand. Obviously, the longer your potential clients are engaged, the better. After all, online advertising can keep people engaged far longer than the time they spend looking at a television commercial, and it offers many more ways to keep people interested than newspaper ad copy.
An engaged website user, for example, might land on an agent’s homepage after a Google search, only to be enticed by a widget that shows home value fluctuations in their area. Once they’ve done that, they might start looking for contact details, and then come across a blog post on a topic that interests them. By this stage, they will have been engaged with the agent’s brand for a good few minutes - a relatively big investment for someone online.
The goal of audience engagement is the reason good content matters so much. As we recently discussed, everything from your website’s tagline to your Twitter updates is an opportunity to draw a potential client in.
So how do you get an idea of how engaged your audience is? A good place to start is your website’s bounce rate, which we’ve looked at in detail here. If visitors to your website are not engaged, they will simply “bounce” away again after just a few seconds.
Your website’s click stream - the series of links a person clicks on while moving around your website - can also give you an idea of what’s engaging users. Is there something most users are drawn to? Is there a section they routinely ignore?
Bounce rate and click stream are just two aspects of web analytics that it pays to become familiar with. Understand what your audience is doing, and you’ll be able to tweak things to maximise their engagement.
Creating valuable engagement with your potential customers isn’t just a matter of being the loudest or most visible online - it’s a matter of quality over quantity. It’s getting your audience in the door, and getting them to stick around long enough to remember you.
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