Connection to Audience
The key to maintaining a connection with your audience is to make sure your content is engaging. Engagement is about more than “likes” or “follows.” It’s about developing relationships, inspiring word-of-mouth. While surveys and things of that nature can be incredibly valuable, data and statistics help you see in a visual way how engaged your audience is.
Remember that word-of-mouth is free advertising
Are you taking advantage of your business’ greatest assets: your customers? According to Inc.com, “Your best salespeople aren’t on your payroll. They aren’t down the hall. In fact, they may not even be in the same building as you. The people best equipped to sell your product might be the people who have already purchased your product. And your ability to turn them into effective advocates for your brand comes down to the customer engagement strategies you adopt.” So how do you develop marketing strategies that work? To start, ask yourself some questions:
- Are my visitors new or old?
- Do they visit the homepage or browse for a bit, then leave? Why is that?
- How many website pages do my visitors read? Which ones are they? How can I make all my pages equally engaging?
- How many people read my blog? get my newsletter? Am I making it easy to sign up? Is my content unique, captivating, motivating? Which posts have gotten the most shares, reads, likes, etc.? Why is that?
- How much time does my audience spend on a single page? Which pages did they spend the longest amount of time on?
- Is there a certain type of content that gets more hits/comments/likes? What kind of devices is your audience using to browse your site? Is your site optimized? Does it load quickly, regardless of the platform?
Figure out what you’re doing right and do it again
Some business owners are afraid of looking at data for fear they’ll lose sight of their vision. While that’s easy to do, you shouldn’t let that be an excuse to not look at the stats. Good business owners look at the numbers and do something with them. Look for patterns of positive engagement, find out why numbers and engagement were so good on those days, times, etc. and then tap into those “sweet spots!”
Keeping your audience engaged can be tough, especially in a day and age where attention spans are short and there is so much content out there. But if you look closely at what your followers are wanting and give them good reasons to stick around (quality content, fast loading speed, polite and fast customer service), your customers will stay engaged and want to share your business with others.