As businesses wrangle with the need to get the benefits of their products and services in front of new audiences, it seems like a no-brainer that garnering engagement on social platforms can be a vital part of growing a business. But it’s not enough to simply create a Facebook page or a Twitter account and hope that users come to you. How you choose to engage with and position your brand in front of those users is critical.
Hint: Exclusively trying to sell what you’ve got on social media doesn’t drive engagement…or purchases.
Social Media Copywriting Rule One: Engage Don’t Sell
So, how does one improve engagement if the focus isn’t on pushing products and services? Think of talking to a potential customer on social media like you’re sitting next to them on a long flight. Sure, they might be a great prospect, but you wouldn’t start in with the sales pitch in the first five minutes. Having a conversation with someone goes a long way. Focus on engaging and creating relationships before you sell, sell, sell.
How do you engage? There are several ways.
- Take advantage of new trends in your industry. Posting memes or tweeting your thoughts about what is going on gives your brand a relatable voice.
- Create informational videos to show your expertise.
- Showcase your people. At the end of the day, people do business with other people that they respect and enjoy working with, even in B2B settings.
- Share things that people would find interesting enough that they might have sought it out. For example, an automobile company could create a timeline of the history of automobiles. This could focus on how manufacturing has grown, types of materials used and how features have changed over time. This could then transition into where your design and inspirations came from. What you share doesn’t have to have a direct connection back to your products or services, but it should be interesting to the type of people you want to be your customers.
Smart Engagement Tip 1: Having a blended mix of funny, educational, and even inspirational material helps create engagement and encourage conversation.
When it makes sense, you can also use current events to share your brand’s message and story to take a stance. By doing this, you’re actually marketing your company.
Once you have made a connection with your audience, you can start to post discounts, new offers, and other more ‘salesy’ content that incentivizes people to try your brand out. An engaged audience will be more likely to take advantage of these.
Smart Engagement Tip 2: Unless it’s part of the DNA of your company, avoid highly emotional topics like political policies and religion. Discussions like these tend to create divisions in your audience. By steering clear of the conversation, you avoid offending potential customers who were close to turning into new leads.
Social Media Copywriting Rule Two: Focus On Value
Many people interacting with you on social media will be hearing about your brand for the first time. What would you need to hear to convince you to learn more about a brand you’ve just been introduced to? Focus any self-promotional content on the value your product or brand has for your followers.
Just like good ads, good social media content plays off people’s emotions. Think about Nike. Shortly after their “Just Do It” slogan released, they started dominating market share. That slogan made people feel as though they could accomplish anything. Their ads played off emotions. Sure, they wanted to sell products, but they did that by selling a dream, not by running ads that focused on “buy now” or “shop here” messaging. Consider how your products or services will positively impact a customer’s life and build your messaging around that idea.
Other Social Media Copywriting Rules
You could see great engagement by following rules one and two, but there are more opportunities for improvement. Once you’ve decided on what kind of content you need to create, the nitty-gritty details become important.
Details to consider:
- Take your time on the title and first line. A customer’s first impression of your content could be their last. You have 1-2 seconds to draw someone in and keep their attention.
- Simplify your language as much as possible and make it relatable. You want to write at about a fifth-grade level so that your audience doesn’t have to work to understand you.
- Consider the placement of your calls to action. Put “small ask” CTAs up front (Learn More, Read More) and “large ask” CTAs after audiences have had a chance to hear your proof points (Buy Now, Call for Quote).
- Do your research and provide proof of statements that you make, whether that means citing other industry sources, research you’ve conducted, or your own anecdotal experience.
Bounce rate is important because search engines use it to determine the relevance of your page or how users are responding to the content. It’s a red flag if the page has a high rank and receives a lot of traffic, but users leave the page before absorbing content or converting. As a result, the page will begin to rank lower and lower because search engines assume the content is not relevant to the searcher’s query.
Having a large volume of traffic isn’t enough. Your website has to provide content that generates action from the user. It has to entice them to want to learn more and continue through the marketing funnel. If you are struggling to convert users and suffering from a high bounce rate, we have some tips that can help improve the bounce rate and lead to more clicks and conversions.
Bounce Rate Tip 1: Evaluate Your Current Content and Keywords
Websites often end up with higher bounce rates because they fail to properly complete the first step: keyword research. Some professionals believe this is becoming unimportant, but adopting this philosophy will leave your brand behind the pack. Keyword research is the foundation of any search campaign.
Once you’ve established the right set of keywords to ‘own,’ review the site content for how well it serves that list. Evaluate the terms you are already ranking for by using search console analytics or your favorite tool to evaluate top pages, pages with high bounce rates, and pages with low impressions or clicks.
Try to understand what features the top-performing pages have compared to the ones with higher bounces. Compare the pages that show up highest in search with the under-performing pages to see what type of content they are providing to the user. For example, the pages with higher bounce rates are sending users to product pages when they are looking for information, or the user was looking for how-to video content and the page had information with written content and no diagrams instead. Understanding your user’s intent and catering content to that intent will drastically decrease the website’s bounce rate and help increase clicks and conversions.
Bounce Rate Tip 2: Designing Compelling Content
Once you know what kind of content needs to live on your site, it’s important to make that content easily accessible and consumable for every user. This leads us to our second bounce rate tip: create a compelling content experience. One of the primary reasons customers leave a page without reading your content or continuing through your funnel is the lack of readability.
Many elements play into the perfect user experience. Is the font clear and easy to read? Are your paragraphs short enough to be easily read on mobile without seeming choppy? Does the color scheme create an attractive contrast that helps the user to focus? All of these things impact user experience. Handled incorrectly, they could cause potential customers to leave instead of converting.
Bounce Rate Tip 3: Clear, Concise Calls to Action
Speaking of getting users to convert, are your calls to action (CTAs) clear, concise, and matched to user intent? For each page on the site, consider where the user is in their buyer’s journey, and fit your CTAs to their needs.
For example, a user who is investigating your services for the first time and lands on an information page might be pushed away by hard-sell, “Buy Now” CTAs before they are ready. Alternatively, someone who is ready to purchase immediately will become frustrated if they can only find more options to “Learn More.”
Some key things to remember about calls to action are the following:
- Is there only one clear and concise CTA?
- Does the CTA stand out?
- Color
- Shape
- Font
- Placement
- Does it relate to the user’s intent?
- Does it provoke emotion?
- Is there persuasive content provided with the CTA?
Final Bounce Rate Tip: Optimize for Mobile
A recent Google study found that users are five times more likely to abandon the task they are trying to complete if the site isn’t optimized for mobile, and 79 percent said they would go back to search and try to find another site to meet their needs. This is important because three in four smartphone users turn to mobile search first to address their immediate needs. This number is only expected to grow.
To help determine if mobile optimization could be the cause of the high bounce rate, use analytics to track where your page entrances start. If you see a high number of users coming from mobile search and bouncing, consider making changes to your mobile user experience.
Final Thoughts on Bounce Rate Tips
Many things can be done to help improve a website’s bounce rate, but we have seen that addressing the site content, user experience, CTAs and mobile optimization will have the most beneficial impact on this metric. If you’re still not sure where your high bounce rate is coming from, here are a few additional pieces of information you can find in your analytics to help shed light:
- If your content is ranking for irrelevant search terms, you may need to review your content and develop more targeted keyword strategy.
- If time on page is relatively good, but users are not moving any further, review your call to actions. Are they concise, clear, and easily found? Do they create and entice action?
- If people are leaving as soon as they land on the page, all the above could be the problem, but do not neglect to see where the traffic is coming from. If a high number of users are coming in through mobile search but leaving, the problem could be solved by optimizing the content for mobile.
In any case, the key is doing the research and analyzing it properly to determine what is causing the problem. Never assume anything and always rely on the metrics to tell you the story.
For a small business with a tight budget, local search optimization can be the right solution for that one key question: How can I increase calls and traffic through the door? Local SEO has its own, complex set of rules. If you’re unfamiliar with building citations and creating consistent NAP information to help increase revenue for your local business, we can help. Follow along with Amuse Digital to learn why local search engine optimization is so important.
What Is Local Search Optimization
Local search optimization is the process of ensuring a business has consistent information in every single profile they have online. A business profile—also called a citation—Includes the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of the company. These show up in places like your social media accounts, business rating sites like Yelp or Angie’s List, and general directories like Whitepages. A lot of these profiles also contain a link back to your website so searchers can easily find your products, services, and other valuable information about the business.
When your business has consistent NAP information on all these different local directories, it signals to search engines that they are all for the same business, and the SEO value of each listing stacks on the next. This means your business will rank higher than companies with missing, duplicate, or inconsistent listings.
Links back to your site from high authority sites like Yellowpages, Yelp, and HotFrog are signals for search engines that your site is packed with valuable information, giving you a slight edge against local competitors who aren’t taking advantage of optimized citations. Companies with optimized citations tend to rank higher in Google and Bing’s local packs (the listings on and underneath the map) as well.
All of these benefits generally add up to an increase in organic local calls and leads.
Quick Tip
A call tracking software like Call Rail can assign specific numbers to users that visit your site from organic search and then call you to book an appointment or make a purchase. This software helps you track success and monitor how local optimization helps your brand increase rankings and revenue over time.
How Local Search Optimization Impacts Organic SEO
Even before the emergence and importance of mobile optimization, companies with consistent local NAP information saw a slight boost in organic search. Companies with a high number of profiles containing consistent NAP info on top directories would often rank higher than competitors who didn’t.
These days, with searches on mobile devices becoming more common than desktop searches, SEO professionals know that local search optimization has a big impact on your local and organic results. Of course, the impact varies depending on how competitive your industry is for your keywords and terms, but the necessity of having a smart local SEO strategy remains the same.
How Local Search Optimization Increases Reviews
Another way local search optimization helps improve rankings is by helping to increase the number of reviews your company receives. Many directories allow users to publish a review and make public notes about their experience with your brand or product. Reviews are important because they help improve your brand’s authority and appeal to potential customers. The more positive reviews you have on a profile, the better. Just remember to monitor your reviews; negative remarks can have the opposite effect. Having someone within your business—or a hired reputation management agency—take note of these reviews and respond to them quickly will help mitigate their negative effect.
How Local Search Optimization Increases Traffic and Revenue
When you improve local and organic rankings, traffic to your website increases as well. This in turn creates more leads, which are converted into more foot traffic and revenue for your business. This may sound overly simple, but it’s really the payoff for all the complex, time-intensive work that goes into good quality local search optimization.
Of course, in smaller, less competitive markets you will see a higher impact and reward. But local SEO remains essential for bigger brands going after national keywords. By overlooking local search, businesses can miss out on thousands of leads every day. If your small business or brand is struggling to find success online, start by increasing content on your website and optimizing all of your local search citations to create some quick wins.
If you are looking for a local SEO service, the contact Amuse Digital today. 713-362-6873