Tweet

How to Engage Your Online Visitors and Interact With Your Internet Customers

Written by: Ryan Bifulco

Article Overview: Learn how to engage more web visitors on your own website. Understand how to interact better with your own online customers and website users. Get tips on improving your online brand. Increase your Internet presence for your brand. Learn how to attract more online customers to your website. Internet Marketing tips to help your brand interact with potential visitors and customers.

How to Engage Your Online Visitors and Interact With Your Internet Customers

The Internet has come full circle and now connects us all. So it is time to lose some control and invite your customers to participate in the sales process rather than simply selling to them as you have for the past 20 years. Now on the Internet it is more about online engagement and interaction with your brand. What I mean is simply that you must have something interesting to entertain your visitors and meet their needs. You need to also include them in your website or Internet marketing plans. So it is the 1960s again in a way as everyone is all one big family.

How does that apply to your small business? It means you better “get” or understand your customers and connect with them as much as possible. If you produce T-Shirts you might allow your online visitors to design their own shirts. If you sell something a bit more complex you might just allow the visitors to customize a certain component within your product. You can also solicit customer opinions with online surveys and feedback. You can allow users to post questions on your site within a bulletin board. You can also invite customers to select your next product or next city you might enter. Online voting is always a fun way to engage your visitors.

It is also about quality over quantity these days since you can reach niche audiences online with the right targeting. If everyone is spending more time on the Internet, it appears behavior has changed. I would rather have 100 hardcore users spend an hour on my site compared to 1000 users spend 1 minute on my site. That is why we have developed out of the box interactive games that engage users and increase time spent on your website. I would also rather have 100 hardcore users tell their friends about my brand or write a blog that mentions my brand.

In today’s world, users also interact with your brand on 3rd party websites, directories, and social networks. Many users are not clicking from your MySpace or YouTube page over to your regular website and that is just fine. But they might book later after being exposed to your brand on these 3rd party websites. How can you really claim to know impressions or bookings for anything online unless you add up all your impressions and bookings from your iTunes page, your MyYahoo headlines, and the thousands of other directories that list your brand. There are 50 MySpaces and 50 YouTubes, so this activity might take a while to tally up. That is why we offer a new service called Social Media Monitoring and another called Social Media Marketing.

But the real measurement is how are you interacting with your online visitors. The amount of time spent on your website by each user is just as important as the number of visitors or users you get each month.

Related Articles
  Online Home Business: Ways To Benefit From Networking
  5 Engaging Ways to Engage Your Audience
  3 Ideas for Creating Traffic to Your Internet Marketing Business Website
  Keep up with online shopping trends or risk becoming irrelevant on the web
  How Twitter can have a postive effect on your business

Article Tags: 1960s, blog, bulletin board, interaction, interactive games, internet marketing, myspace, niche audiences, online surveys, party websites, small business, social networks, world users



Related Forum Posts
Re: Kevin's Case Study #11 - A New Forum Category? - [quote:31qpen1j]This is just my opinion, but I consider the prospective categories, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing and Online Promotion, as being pretty much one and the same - just different words that different people use.[/quote:31qpen1j] I completely agree! Those are all just "internet marketing" as far as I am concerned. And I normally would have voted for internet marketing, however I chose social media marketing simply because there are more than enough IM forums out there already.
Re: Two Useful Books To Help You Focus On The CLIENT - Hi David, To add to your thread, I'd like to recommend Jonathan Tisch's "Chocolates On The Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience". Tisch's book includes content on "Welcoming Customers", "The New Art of Customization", "The Challenges of Customer Diversity" and "Offering Something Extra to Your Customers" to name a few.
Kevin's Case Study #11 - A New Forum Category? - Hi Everyone, 2009 is a new year and I'd like to create a new forum category to jazz things up! In the past, there's been some interest voiced about adding a "Social Media Marketing", "Online Marketing", "Internet Marketing" or "Online Promotion" category. I'll implement [u:1g2tv6tf]ONE[/u:1g2tv6tf] of those new categories, but can someone first tell me what the difference would be between the existing "Marketing" section and one of those new options mentioned above? Thanks
Re: Kevin's Case Study #11 - A New Forum Category? - Hi Kevin, Like GT suggested, I also think you can add Internet Marketing as a sub category in the Marketing section and also a Social marketing as subcategory. Online marketing/internet marketing/online promotion are the same, and it will be best to use the common term - Internet marketing. I can't think about someone to moderate a Social Marketing category. We all use it, we all know how to make it work and we all have our own different experience with it.
Re: How many mambers of this forum are also member of WF? - Hi Kevin, I have to agree with Tanny. All forums are unique in their own way, but doesn't mean that one is better than the other. What you might get out of one forum, you may not get from another. For instance, the WF focuses on Internet Marketing, while this forum focuses on Entrepreneurship. Each has their own set of benefits. I don't think you can really compare one to the other, unless of course they focused on the same topic. I have learned a lot from this forum, stuff I would never have gotten from the WF. With that being said, I've learned a lot from the WF, specifically since I need to know about Internet Marketing and running an online business. The addition of the Online Business forum here will help, and Jeff is doing a great job as moderator.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Leader's Success Secret: Celebration

How to develop the best lateral thinking skills

How Promotional Caps became a Fashion Trend

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.