Your website is a powerful tool that can help you generate more leads and sales, but it’s not enough to simply have one. You need to make sure that people are engaged with your content in order for them to continue coming back for more. In this article, we’re going over the four different ways you can better engage your website audience so they want to keep coming back – and ultimately so that you can sell your products or services to them!
When most people think about engaging with their audience, they usually think about Content Marketing. Content marketing is broad and covers a lot – videos, social media, blogging, website content, infographics, and a whole lot more. We’re going to cover some of these to help you determine if they’re right for you, but before we do, let’s first look at why we’re doing this.
Engagement is the second step of the Customer Value Journey. It comes in between the Aware stage and the Subscribe stage. That means that the people we are really focused on – for the purpose of this post, anyway – are people who have just discovered your company but are not very familiar.
The mistake that most businesses make is that they immediately start trying to sell their product or service to people as soon as they become aware that you exist – and that’s simply too early for most people. It’s just not how people buy things. We’re smart marketers, so we’re going to do something different. We’re going to intentionally engage with our new audience, provide lots of value, and nudge them toward becoming a subscriber.
The importance of retargeting during the Engage phase.
It doesn’t do any good to put a bunch of energy and money into getting in front of your target audience, only to have them come to your site once and never think about you again. People are busy, they have other things going on, 100 other tabs open on their browser, and even if they like what they see, they may very well just need to do some more research before they’re ready to buy.
It’s up to you be proactive and get in front of them again. That’s where retargeting ads come in. Retargeting ads are really powerful – allowing you to say, “When someone does an important action, I want to add them to a certain list and show them a certain ad.” Because these people have previously engaged with you in some way, these ads will almost always be your highest performing ads, getting you the best results for the lowest cost.
If you’re not running retargeting ads, you are 100% leaving money on the table.
How to get started with retargeting ads
First, decide who you want to show your ads to. For the Engage stage, these are people who have engaged with you in a minor way – they’ve visited your site, watched a video, or liked a post on Facebook. They aren’t yet subscribers or customers.
If you’re running retargeting ads on Facebook or Google (both of which I highly recommend), you can set this up pretty easily. Just make sure to add their pixel to their site, and create a Custom Audience of anyone who has visited your website in the last 180 days. If your audience seems too small, you may also want to add in anyone who has engaged with any of your posts in the last couple of months.
Finally, to make sure that you’re not also showing these ads to your current prospects and customers, set up an exclusion audience of subscribers and customers. This can get a little tech-y, since that data is stored in your CRM or customer database, and you’ll need to have a sync between so that Facebook stays in the know about who is subscribing and buying from you.
If you need help getting this set up or don’t have the right software in place to organize your contacts, please reach out to us. We can get you set up with a low-cost CRM that will make your life so much easier.
Finally, run some ads that are promoting some of your highest-value content. These could be videos, blog posts, or anything else that you’ve created that provides value. At the bottom of these articles or posts, you should have a link to a premium offer or lead magnet, where you can entice the visitor to become a subscriber. We have lots of info on that process in our article, 5 Proven Tips to Grow Your Subscriber Base.
Define your goals
While you don’t want to be too pushy, you also don’t want to simply provide free content to your list forever. At a certain point, you’ll want to begin transitioning over to the Subscribe stage, where you are beginning to entice them to give you their contact info in exchange for a great offer.
I hope this has been helpful! Happy Marketing! {{cta(‘fdc8c07a-8304-45e2-97bd-6b548c0e9564′,’justifycenter’)}}
