In the current internet age and its corresponding digital data explosion, a recent study shows that our attention span is shorter than 8 seconds, even shorter than a goldfish! We crave being connected and up-to-date, but this has impacted on our ability to stay focused and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant stimuli.
This inevitably affects how you get visitors to engage with and stay on your website. Understanding what motivates people and catering to these reduced attention spans is paramount in ensuring your message gets across and that you keep visitors on your website long enough for them to convert. Every second is precious and these five easy strategies can help you be successful.
1. Get social
With many different social media channels available, it’s important for any business to build a strong social media presence. This helps in a number of areas: brand recognition, customer service, more affordable marketing, not to mention boosting your SEO rankings. Having a strong following and showing an increase in real followers can significantly improve how you rank in search engine results. As well as carefully writing posts in a way that helps users share your message, make sure you’re highlighting your social accounts in as many places as possible. At POWr we’ve found that successful ways of doing this include adding social media icons to your site, for example, or adding an automatic social feed to your homepage. This is a great way of ensuring the content on your website is up-to-date and shows your latest products, updates or offers. What’s more, it helps you build a sense of community surrounding your business, which leads us to strategy number two!
2. Build a sense of community
In addition to using social media, allowing users to interact with each other or see comments and feedback from others is a great way of driving engagement and making them feel like they’re a part of something bigger. Adding a comments section to your site, or a place to leave reviews, makes it possible for your visitors to interact with your business directly. It helps you provide better customer service by getting direct feedback and provides other visitors with confidence that they can trust you. You can even allow users to comment on other comments, fostering the sense of community that keeps people coming back to your site.
3. Customize!
Make sure you test whatever you have on your website and tailor it to your audience. From simple things such as headlines to apps you add to your site, you want to ensure they are optimized for your site visitors. The key is not to make any assumptions. For example, if you add a great-looking popup to your site with a tempting promotion you want to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your visitors’ browsing experience or frustrate them:
With so many customization options available you should always be testing small tweaks in the design of your website and in the plugins that you use, as well as in its written messaging.
- Test the best time to show this, perhaps it’s only when they show exit intent;
- Try different colors;
- Try different animations.
With so many customization options available you should always be testing small tweaks in the design of your website and in the plugins that you use, as well as in its written messaging.
4. Mix it up
We’ve talked about adding your social feeds to your website, but in addition there are numerous ways you can add mixed media to your website. When you consider that articles with images get 94% more views, it’s not for nothing that they say a picture is worth a thousand words. There are many ways of adding images to your website, or even better mix them with videos, screenshots, infographics and other visual aids. At POWr we’ve found that the most successful ways of driving engagement are by using moving slideshows or galleries where you can mix the content and customize the layout, sizing and other properties.
5. Be responsive!
Final tip: make sure your site is mobile responsive! While your website might look awesome on a computer screen, often its appearance on other devices is not considered or left as an afterthought. With so many connected devices, from cell phones, tablets and large projectors, it’s important to make sure that the overall design of your website and any plugins you use look great no matter what device they’re being viewed on. This has always been one of our priorities, so that you don’t have to be a technical genius or spend hours figuring it out. Find the plugins that work for you and rest-assured that your hard work won’t go to waste and your site will look beautiful on any device.
Emilie Murphy Emilie works in Product Marketing at POWr. POWr’s mission is to provide affordable solutions to help small businesses grow.
