Build a Powerful Engagement Experience for Your Visitors

Good things can happen if your visitors find your content, brand and personality relevant and interesting. When they’re spending time in it, it shows your content has impacted them, and made them feel good about themselves and their pursuit.

The more engagement, the more likely they’ll progress to become your next customer.

When your content is sticky or engaging, there is a chance you’ll turn a variety of visitors at different phases of their buying journey into leads — particularly your high-intent prospects.

This post will be time well spent to help you understand how to improve your content’s meaning, effect, helpfulness, along with its inspirational and activating power. You’ll be better able to advise your content creators on a content strategy that actually generates customers and sales.

Engagement is still the buzzword today, but how many content creators really know what engagement really is about?

Engaging Content Makes Customers feel Good and Confident

Immersive + engaging content means the visitor or customer is emotionally involved with your topics and how they connect to their unfulfilled needs. It’s all about that connection to their information or transaction quest (e.g., a trip to Spain) and how they feel about that. Engagement means a content experience that makes them feel good and confident.

AI search engines want you to have content that answers questions or that solves their information quest reliably. But as a Realtor or travel business owner, you need content that engages them emotionally and gets them to act on their desire (good feelings and self-esteem). It’s not about info. It’s about creating a nice vibe or feeling that makes them believe your product/service will generate the pleasing outcome they want (eg., homeowners actually don’t want to sell their house — they want to create a new, happier, more comfortable lifestyle for themselves).

Our quest might extend from deep customer research to building a persuasive content infrastructure for them. Because a strategically-built suite of compelling, useful and satisfying content is persuasive and useful. It will also help your search engine visibility and maybe even create some ready-to-buy customers. The result is something you’ll feel good about while delivering the experience they’ll enjoy a whole lot more.

Engagement is an Exploratory Process and a Conversation

When you hear the word engagement, you might think of videos, widgets or chatbots and something interactive. But we’re more interested in what’s going on psychologically with the visitor and whether their intent to buy is being translated into a purchase (e.g., travel trip booking).

Engagement is a process of creating a conversation or brand/product experience with your visitors and one that makes them feel good about themselves.

To be engaging means the visitor is absorbing content and messages, but also responding emotionally or by clicking, scrolling, and typing. It’s not just great content that sets the table for engagement. It’s having them come into a process or framework that serves or escorts them to a decision (e.g., sell their house or buy a trip to California).

Even the smallest interruption in the process could terminate the visit. They might leave when a gap makes them lose their confidence in their purpose or mission, or you have reduced their self-esteem. If you build up their confidence through your content, they’ll persist on your site and assertively persist to find the solution you might have. They’ll sniff the trail to satisfaction, even though you’ve been clumsy with your content delivery.

The real immediate, internal conversation they have is “will this content and company make me feel good about what I want?” They wonder, “is this company able to create the path to my goal?” So right from the get-go, your design, brand message and content have to indicate it is.

Get to Know Your Customers Deeply

That’s very frustrating when you’ve worked so hard on your copy and visuals and you spent a fortune on ppc ads. To do an engagement strategy well, you need know your customers deeply. Study them, meet them, ask questions, take notes, get feedback, and understand their views and pain points very intimately. What are they wanting? Why do they believe your product/service can help? What content do they view? What keywords, questions and pages made them arrive at your site?

Knowing your customers is the fount of engagement and persuasion optimization. It’s so important to study their wants and their customer profile so you can create engaging, immersive, positive, validating feelings and then buying actions. Keep in mind, they may already know what they’re reading or viewing, and that the engagement they seek is persuasion to buy. Providing information won’t be engaging for them. It won’t generate the sale. Rather, the goal is to peak their buying intent, make them picture themselves intensely as already purchased, and wanting to to complete the transaction so it matches their internal belief. Give them permission to feel good, comfortable and confident about their intention.

This is where engagement becomes a powerful concept you can’t do without in your content strategy and your AI marketing campaigns.

Make the Path to Fulfillment Easy to See

Engagement is about clarity too. When your customers land on your website or see your ads/promotion, do they know what to do or where they’re going? When that path is clear, they’ll have more confidence they’ll get what they want. For example, they may know very little about the beaches in Spain or the Caribbean, but your content helps make immediate sense that this is what they really want — the beautiful beaches where they have the leisurely, relaxing and enjoyable time they want. The path to a Spain or Caribbean beach is paved with images they believe in and like. It’s content that’s engaging and immersive to get them to take the risk of the unknown to a place outside their comfort zone.

That message is easy to see and feel, so you can now sell them a trip to Spain, the Caribbean or Mexico.

Taking them to a strange, foreign place right away actually isn’t engaging and doesn’t generate the travel booking. Are they even ready for that? And getting a homeowner to sell their house for a higher price doesn’t generate the lead. But getting them to feel their discontent with their current home and then visualize the home they want is a process that might generate a seller real estate lead.

The Visitor and The Customer Journey

The visitor’s journey usually begins on Google and increasingly on ChatGPT. They’re actively searching for an engaging experience that will create some action, which only they know. They’re following a path to find a solution. They’re looking for a practical entry point, one they can comprehend and be comfortable with, and then building their confidence to experience your solution. If your UVP or the goal is transparent, understandable, trustworthy and inviting, they’ll continue their exploration.

The goal/solution must be apparent and clear in their terms or the engagement will end

What I find with many websites is the lack of an invitation to a conversation that will resolve their buying intent. Lacking that invitation, visitors feel the company really isn’t sincerely interested in their needs and isn’t supporting their quest to buy what they think they need. Initially, it’s not about your stuff, it’s about what they want. Buyers need encouragement, permission and support to get from first sight to the booking page.

It’s a big commitment to buy/sell a house or book a complex trip to a country a long way away.

For us marketers, the engagement is about helping them find their solution in the content and let the content create a supportive conversation to help them complete their purchase desires. If you sell long trips to Europe, your content would:

welcome them to their dream of traveling to a place millions of others are traveling to
validate their desire to travel to Europe
help them visualize the specific travel experience they might have in mind
build trust, relevance and your expert authority
make them feel comfortable about planning a trip with you to the destination they’re thinking of
make them feel your agency is the only one they should consider

What do the Lifestyle People Know?

When it comes to engagement and emotional conversations, we might learn from lifestyle bloggers. They show us that connection can happen via simple things like a bowl of salad and a tasty dipping sauce.

Practical, down to earth, visual, sensual, and people are what they’re all about. For example, some of them focus on a consistent pain point of people – creating interesting, tasty and healthy meals. The food begs a conversation in so many ways. But the focal point or goal is, “what’s in this and how do I make it?” The conversation is launched, yet a good blogger will be constantly interacting via Facebook and asking visitors what ingredients they like, how they categorize this food, what dietary issues visitors have, and what’s their favorite food.

The conversation is about what will make them feel like they’re acting to improve their health. So the engagement is about validating their wish to be healthier, capturing their intent to do it, and then helping them visualize the things that make that dream come true. In this case it’s some very healthy salad recipes they could try. Foodie Crush’s web traffic is massive and growing fast so Heidi’s content is obviously engaging her audience.

Prospect Engagement is Critical to Sales Conversion

Customers don’t buy until they have a clear, positive feeling of confidence. So engagement is a process of creating that feeling of positive confidence (it’s actually self-esteem they’re wanting). Engagement isn’t empty interaction and clicking, it’s purposeful movement like exploring, learning, assessing and deciding so they can get the good feelings they’re after.

Your engaging content should build desire, conviction, purpose and intent, and eagerness to buy now. It’s the most important element in marketing yet very few business people want to know about it. It gets little respect even among marketers who are hard-pressed to create an engagement plan or strategy, or to measure engagement performance.

How to Improve Visitor Engagement

Below you’ll find 22 useful tips, some infographics, examples, and more insight into powering up your new website engagement strategy below.

Engagement is the strategic process of connecting with visitors/customers on an emotional level and making them feel that they are fulfilling their purpose

An Example of Creating Engagement Channels

Let’s look at a practical example of engagement. Let’s say you own a kitchen design and renovation firm and you’re wondering how your content strategy might be organized.

You need an overall plan. And you don’t need to be a genius. You do need to understand what your customer actually wants, what drives their interest, and how they make decisions (and all decisions are emotional).

The visitor, a homeowner has searched for kitchen renovation Toronto in Google search and they click through to arrive at your designer/renovator website. The website is ready for them because it was designed not for presenting “here’s our stuff” but rather to let them choose the path and to experience the design vision/solution they’re looking for.

The prospect wants a better kitchen, but they’re not sure what design style, layout or cost. The best approach might be to give them a general slideshow, video, or before-and-after pics of a typical kitchen reno so they can visually experience the beautiful kitchen they dream of. At the same time, this content proves the design/renovator firm has the ability to build that kitchen.

Giving them a picture gallery right away might only confuse them, and they’re likely not ready to fill out a quote form. That’s not respecting this wonderful, emotional journey they’re on. Content strategy means patience and a kind of romancing of the visitor with all the reasons they want a new kitchen. The material should focus on validating why and what. How, when, where and who can come later. The key is to make them feel good and validate this dream. It keeps them on your site — which is engagement.

Artisan Kitchens of Calgary, Canada uses a simple solution of showing the step-by-step process right away on their homepage. This strategy suggests that homeowner education is the top problem and that homeowners should contact them right away.

But is this enough of an experience where the visitor is ready to make that call? Consumers want to be 80% through a process before they contact sales. Otherwise they’ll feel awkward, confused and vulnerable to high-pressure tactics — confidence, comfort and self-esteem plummet. Their step-by-step process does lead them to a high-res gallery of kitchens. The question to ask is, does this process answer the visitor’s vision, concerns and emotional desire?

After this, the prospect could be directed to a design studio for design ideas where they can click on features they want. A video is nice but it can’t possibly carry a whole engagement strategy by itself.

2. Engagement Pieces

Content:

your homepage, blogs, tweets, videos, pictures, data, etc is the experience and the your brand promise. If you can somehow discover what it is your visitors actually want to experience online (learning, purchasing, certainty, validation, confidence building, esteem, empowerment, getting rid of conflicts and problems) you might be able to research and develop richer content for them to read or view.
They expect content that is relevant and significant to them and which is somehow personalized to their unique perspective and needs.

Interaction:

begins with scrolling, reading and clicking, and progresses to them using their imagination and making some calculations
moves them to content that creates excitement, surprise, delight, and awe, and it should have a good mix of emotion-laden content that suggests promise of satisfaction.

Monitor your Engagement Metrics

Assess your engagement success via your Google Analytics reports. See which links they’re clicking on in your page, where they go next on your site, how long they read the page, how many pages they visit, and whether they’re returning to your site.

If your engagement is low, you need to discover which of these root causes are suppressing it:

weak value proposition
ugly website with some unpleasant material
poor flow to the copywriting and other content
low-quality, poorly qualified visitors
ranking on the wrong keyword phrases
hard to read and navigate content
negative or boring tone to content — too stiff and unimaginative
content too deep for shallow audiences – have some light stuff for them
irrelevant value proposition – they don’t want your stuff
lack of content – you have to have something for them to read or view
poor quality content – get a content strategist/writer/videographer to help
lack of credibility/authority/brand power – your site, credentials and Linkedin profile may be hurting you
lack of color and zest in your content – find something interesting — curate some content
lack of personal presence in your content – why aren’t you in your content?
lack of engaging stories to tell – you need to get out and about, travel, network and engage with others yourself so take some time out for those activities

Do You Need Better Sources of Visitors?

Sometimes websites are drawing the wrong crowd. You might have low Google rankings, your email lists might not be great, and your social traffic is flighty. Take a look your analytics reports for info on what your visitors are interested in. Are these the customers you want? Could you incorporate something into your content to warm these people up?

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics isn’t something most companies do well. It’s actually a complicated visitor statistics thing comprised of many data signals.

Adopting a sound visitor and sales analytics solution is good. I’m not sure HubSpot is sufficient and you might need to investigate software with more depth and complexity. AI analytics solutions are obviously the new gold standard. If we have data in spreadsheets, we can feed it to ChatGPT or Google Gemini for some interesting insights.

But What to Measure?

Here are some metrics to examine:

time spent on site
time spent on your key pages
number of pages viewed on a specific topic (drilling down)
scroll depth – how far down the page do they scroll
Click-through paths – are they progressing through pages like you want?
video views and the amount of time spent
reaching key target pages
downloads
subscriptions
blog comments left
return visits
visit frequency – time between last visit and most recent visit
pageviews per visit
direct visits (bookmarks)
social media shares
phone calls
actual purchases and amount of revenue

A Visitor Engagement Metrics Formula!

Some believe everything in life can be reduced to a mathematical formula. Well, turns out that an engagement formula is exactly what we’re after, if we want to improve measurement.

How about this homemade engagement formula:

number of interactive clicks x minutes spent on site / number of unique visitors.

This formula responds to the percentage of visitors who click a lot and stay awhile. Then we filter it further by applying it only to those who view any of this certain key content such as testimonials, product specs, price packages, contact and about us pages, key blog posts, and downloadables and who actually send an email or make a phone call.

A good programmer could set this tracking up on your site. Once you get into this, you’ll begin to see which customer touchpoints are the ones that result in more leads and revenue. New AI marketing software is promising to not only do this for you, but also to experiment with your content to find out what works better. Learn more about AI marketing software solutions.

Marketo is a marketing platform that offers some engagement scoring.

At this time of writing, there are few analytics solutions that track engagement at a serious level. So there’s a big opportunity for an AI analytics software firm here. If you know of any, please leave a comment below.

23 Tips on How to Increase Engagement

Okay, back to our quest to create the most intense and lasting engagement on your real estate or travel website. The task is unique for every business, but consider these tips that will help you build a powerful content engagement experience.

Know what your conversion goal is before you begin creating the content that will take your visitors there.
Know the specific type of client/customer you’re targeting. Are they serious and professional, fun and light-hearted, ambitious and driven, insecure and cautious, or
Know the specific type of client/customer you’re targeting. Are they serious and professional, fun and light-hearted, ambitious and driven, insecure and cautious – include some content or an interactive widget (a game, test, or photo) to let them exercise that personality trait
Remember why your visitor is visiting you since it’s your starting point
Use visual content graphics, video, original relevant photos, illustrations, charts
Ask them questions in your copy and in some graphics – warm up their decision-making muscles
Ask them to share or connect on social media and give them something to shre and react to
Create more, deeper, helpful, spirited, open-ended content that invites visitors to explore. It’s content that beckons, surprises, and fascinates. Being fascinating is very hard work, yet customers love a fascinating person, brand or product. They talk about it, share it, and become a brand ambassador.
Give your content some embellishment since content that’s too efficient is to dry and doesn’t build intent. And it could turn visitors off.
Use relevant symbols and people to elevate your brand or make it more fun (e.g., the Charmin toilet paper Bear cartoon characters increased social shares 585%)
Be distinct and memorable. Make your dialogue and voice distinct and relatable yet sound like someone who actually can help make their dreams come true by linking to your explicitly professionally worded services page.
Create stories if you can but they must be very relevant — a story about how you helped a client with that very problem or how a person was made happier or more successful is always effective.
If they like some of your content, create more of it, go deeper with insight and ask them if theyd like to ask you a question
Stimulate emotion because people make decisions based on emotion
Get them to visualize forward to how their dissatisfaction and future success will be impacted if they don’t get involved with you
Create likability and empathy by discussing what you do for others, use humor, and tell them why it’s so good to do what you’re talking about — enthusiasm!
Trust, credibility and authority is important to readers so ensure youre building credibility with facts they can quickly verify so link out to relevant, high-quality articles on other websites
Create content continuity by publishing content that adds value to previous posts but all points to some key post/offer/event off in the future
Toward the end of our posts/content, have links and leads to your social pages. This gives them a fuller view of you right now and what you’re up to.
Have a good call to action. The body of your engagement should lead to a contact, but it’s okay to ask them to move forward and ask for a free consultation of some sort on a pressing issue.
Use a contest and an online survey where possible. This enhances the visit and makes it more memorable.
Ask them to email you for something for free such as special guide to solving a problem
Ensure you link to your relevant content throughout your posts – in fact this is a key part of your content and SEO strategy.

Engagement Isn’t Isolated Events – It’s a Process

Engagement isn’t really a goal, it’s a process of achieving your goal of getting visitors into your content and to become emotionally connected to you.

Don’t be perfect. Show sincere intent to make them feel good, grow their confidence, validate their intent, and fulfill their need. Be interested in their need for emotional fulfillment because decisions are emotional Your content will generate the spirit of following through on their intent or mission whether it’s to buy your product, buy a house, sign a mortgage, or travel to exotic locations. That’s because that action is consistent with everything they’ve felt and believe in your content experience.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this immersion in visitor engagement. Bookmark it for future reference because if there is one improvement you can make to your sales and marketing efforts, it’s engagement that matters. I’ll be updating this post regularly. Check out the recent post on social media strategy.

Further Material on Online Engagement

See more on how to create persuasive content experiences and build strong trust with visitors. Agentic AI marketing solutions for travel businesses are in vogue now given how powerful these systems are. They help us design and deliver effective campaigns.

Contact me Gord at 416 998 6246 to discuss content strategy and how we can create a wonderful online experience for your customers.

Build a Powerful Engagement Experience for Your Visitors

Engaging Content Makes Customers feel Good and Confident