Getting the Fundamental Principles of Web Engagement Right

Web engagement is a strategy that builds relationships between your business and your customers (including prospects) by optimising your digital footprint. It involves sharing the right content and responding to user commentary in a timely manner. And also involves nurturing relationships and enhancing user experiences for your audience. A well-defined web engagement strategy will leave your clients feeling a deep connection with your brand. They will anticipate your content you send out and share it with their friends, thereby widening your organic reach.

Content Optimisation

You need content to drive engagement. It is not enough to put out one article after another. There has to be a strategy behind the content you share and where you share them. Whether on your website or a social page, great content will do a whole lot more than no content. Understanding the goal behind your web engagement will arm you with the right tools of engagement. Not every content will do well with your audience, but if you take your time to chart your course, you will soon see why visitors to your various web and social pages are reacting a particular way.

Social Media

Social media marketing is very important in deepening your digital footprint. As part of your web engagement strategy, it is important to deliver targeted content to your audience. There is no time for a one-cap-fits-all approach in this fast-changing cyber space. Your best bet at achieving success is sharing content that will elicit the kind of reaction you want from the different segments of your audience. Remember, there can’t be engagement on social if there is no content on social media. And so make sure the images you are sharing on social media are formatted right. Also, tailor content to fit the platforms on which you wish to use them. What will drive engagement on Twitter might attract scorn on LinkedIn. Make sure you are owner of the content you share on social sites. If you are sharing content from other creators,  give credit where it’s due, lest you are exposed for plagiarism and charged with intellectual property theft. Just like excellent content could lead to high engagement, bad, stolen works on social media will lead to a bad reputation you might never be bale to recover from. At Gesatech, your business gets a dedicated E-Community manager to create and share content across all your social pages. In addition, the manager works with your marketing team to engage readers on your products as well as on upcoming events. Communication is a two-way affair in social media, and a business that posts content without engaging loses touch with its customers.

Website

Content is not only for social media. In fact, businesses need to create a marketing strategy that puts assets they legally own at the heart of matters. Your social pages will remain online as long as Facebook and LinkedIn allow them. A change in algorithms, for example, limits your access to potential clients. In a worse case scenario, the content of your pages might be flagged by some disgruntled customer or a rival business. Your website, however, belongs to you for as long as you are the registrant of the domain name. For this reason, don’t limit your web engagement strategy to social pages only. There are ways to use business blogging to invite new and old clients to your business website to drive engagement and, ultimately, sales. Basic website integrations like push notifications, popups, and chatbots can address customer needs at just the right moment.  Some web engagement services include in-site marketing campaigns where content is recommended to customers based on their recent habits on your site.

Email Marketing

Despite the emphasis on social media by many marketers, email marketing is a very important tool for web engagement. For one thing, newsletters carry with them a sense of importance that social media doesn’t. Social is seemingly fleeting. Emails, on the other hand, are steeped in much preparation and require very intelligent decision-making. When your newsletter reaches a client’s inbox, they know the message was intended for them alone. There is a personal connection and, when the content is well-put, responses can be over the roof. Obviously, not all emails are born equal. For best result, use a subject line that is self-explanatory; something catchy without being ‘click-baity’. You don’t want to trick your potential leads and customers into wasting precious time reading content that doesn’t add value. They might engage with said content, but not in a good way. Before you know it, your email address has been blacklisted and flagged as spam.

Analytics

This is where serious business is built. Anybody can create content. With a smartphone and internet access, you will be able to open an Instagram account in a few seconds and get your first few followers within a day using the right hashtags. But what are you getting back given how much you have spent on one ad? Where are your biggest fans? On social or via email? Have you seen a pattern between the time of day and the posts that do so well? Digital is different from traditional media because it is possible to quantify every second and every dollar spent in web engagement. Reading the numbers behind customer engagement is sometimes even more important because it determines the next budget by reporting on your success or near-misses. All web engagement should be built on an understanding and appreciation of data. At the end of the ad campaign, results should be assessed to see which part needs tweaking. There are many tools for capturing and measuring such data. From Facebook’s insights to the very popular Google Analytics, a myriad of tools will provide a thousand perspectives for your brand. By engaging a Gesatech Web Engagement expert, though, you will receive the right perspective on all your engagement data to inform your future decisions without having to do the heavy-lifting yourself.

Mobile

The world has gone mobile. As a business, you can’t afford to ignore this trend when drafting your web engagement strategy. The simplest way to reach your audience on mobile is via SMS. It requires no internet connection and can work on any mobile device. Using USSD codes, you can let your customers subscribe to your content or even provide feedback. You can also send promotional materials. To drive engagement, you need the right copy for your short messages sent at just the right time. Talk to Gesatech to find out how you can use bulk SMS to reach more people. Web engagement is the strategy that uses content to drive customer interaction in order to boost sales or increase brand awareness. From social media to on-site content strategy, web engagement can help you sell your ideas to more people by following a clear, time-bound strategy. These are a few tips from our web engagement playbook at Gesatech.