Audience engagement is critical for connecting and communicating with your target market online, whether you are a plumber, dentist or a retailer.

There are a large variety of brands in every sector possible seeking new customers and thinking of ways which they can bring back customers who have engaged previously.

Your companies’ competitive advantage is in your ability to stand out from the crowd in forming genuine, human relationships with your customers and prospects. It takes more than a beautiful website and persuasive copy to truly connect with your online audience.

Online marketing is very competitive and customers have learned to identify untrustworthy websites. Websites may be untrustworthy if they are badly designed, have a lack of trust symbols (such as payment information and register company numbers) or ask for too much information.

You must position your offering and convert the customer within the shortest time period possible while getting across every benefit of the product or service you are trying to sell.

The first step for reaching more customers online is to identify relevant buyer personas and find out how thy search, where they hand out and what type of media they interact with – this could be video, static imagery or just text. Make sure that your brand has a strong foundation in place with all marketing channels, from organic to paid marketing and email.

1. Social Media Strategies

Social media can be powerful if done correctly. However, it’s not for all businesses. As a digital marketer, it’s in your best interest to align with the social channels that your customers and prospects are already engaging with.

If they’re on LinkedIn, make sure that you set up an account on that platform — even if you’re not ready to actively participate, you should at least watch and see how your customer community is interacting. Did you find that your target audience has no presence on Twitter?

You should experiment with different social media platforms instead until you find out exactly where your target market resides.

2. Behaviour targeting using Google Adwords and Google Analytics

Google Adwords can be a valuable tool for many businesses. It can help grow your online revenue massively. You may be surprised to know that there are many additional ad networks out there with powerful audience targeting features. These platforms build comprehensive profiles of users on the internet. Through data analysis, ad networks can identify who you want to reach. Using Google Analytics data with Google search console will provide you with great insights for optimising your organic and paid search campaigns.

For example, if you’re a Glasgow based lawyer who is seeking new business, for instance, you can work with advertising solutions providers to reach customers who have searched for cases that align with your area of focus. The ability to connect with prospects that are already searching for your product, or service can generate increased revenue.

3. Create a relevant content marketing strategy

Content marketing strategies can help scale your business. Creating and updating your website’s blog consistently gives you free organic traffic and can help build your online business quickly and easily. This also helps to position your company as an industry leader and expert in your industry. If you want to attract visitors, what’s key is that you build editorial calendars, topic ideas, and keyword lists that are in complete alignment with your prospects’ areas of interest.

By choosing relevant topics and recent news, you will give your brand the potential to achieve high rankings and visibility in organic search channels. Therefore, it is good to do in-depth keyword research to learn the exact questions and search queries that your potential customers use. Position your brand as a provider of factually correct answers and solve your customer’s problems.

4. Remarketing

Creating a remarketing campaign to drive customers who have previously shown interest back to the website can prove successful. For this you will need to write clever text ads, create a email campaign for customers who have abandoned cart or design engaging banner ads and place these on a Google Adwords campaign.

5. Reviews

Your customer reviews and testimonials should connect with prospects on an emotional level and give them confidence during the buying process. When visitors see your product or services for the very first time, they are mostly asking “what’s the benefits for me?”

You can simplify this mental process by providing a direct answer to this question. You should show them examples of happy customers — social proof that underpins why your brand is good at what it sets out to do.

Ask individuals that you have worked with to provide a testimonial on your LinkedIn page, or to provide one that you can put on your website.

6. Search Engine Optimisation

Analysing every aspect of your website from the content to the quality of backlinks pointing to your domain. Technical SEO optimisation should also be looked after – this means including relevant keywords in your page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, headers and content.

Schema mark-up will display your business reviews and address correctly. While rich snippet optimisation gives your users an easier experience before they visit your website.
Final note

Many online marketing strategies are simply a means to an end of achieving the same business development goals that you’re accustomed to offline. You should always focus on finding your customers, and align your strategies to them. Customers behave differently online in comparison to offline.

Get in touch with us today for a SEO audit or call us for free advice on 0141 374 2165