Turn Your Website Visitors Into Your Brand Advocates
No matter what kind of company you have or work for, you have two types of customers:
- People who buy from you
- People who will tell other people to buy from you
Sometimes people can play both roles. In today’s world, you need to be aware that while someone may not become a purchaser of your products or services, if you have quality content that they find valuable for their circles of friends, they will share it and lead to paying customers.
This is another reason why content marketing is so important. You can use content marketing to build brand awareness in your target audience communities. If you are able to grab the attention of a highly influential individual in your target audience AND you have a quality piece of content for them to share (article, video, podcast, presentation, info graphic, etc.), that’s when you will really start to see results in your online presence.
Encourage Social Sharing Of Your Content
Make it easy for people to share your content.
Place share buttons at the top of your blog posts. This will give your visitors one-click access to spreading the word about your brand. If your website is run on WordPress (highly recommended) then you can install the DiggDigg plugin and this will automatically add the social sharing buttons to your WordPress blog posts.
When you have something like DiggDigg set up on your website, the process for people to share is one step:
- Click the button for the network they want to share on
If you don’t add an easy way for your visitors to share your content, it will become too daunting a task for them to accomplish and you will miss out on a huge opportunity to get your name out there. Think about what they would have to do without a simple social media share button:
- Copy the url of the page
- Go to their preferred social network’s website
- Write in their own description of your content
- Paste the link
And if they want to share it on more than one network? Forget about it. Don’t miss out on the opportunity for happy visitors to spread your word, add those social share buttons to your site.
Offer Incentives For Sharing
To really encourage social sharing, offer incentives for your visitors. You can add social media incentives in a few different ways:
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Offer exclusive content for people who share your articles. You can use a WordPress plugin to set up a “share to unlock” offer on your website. This will allow access to a web page on your site only after someone shares the page on one of their social media networks. Inbound Now also has some apps that you can use even if your website isn’t on WordPress.
- Gamify your website. You can use a point system for your fans to earn points towards prizes, rewards or even free products. Rewarding your top advocates is a great way to turn your fans into evangelists for your company. There are many different third-party apps that will allow you to add gamification to your online presence like Fanzy, Big Door or BadgeVille, just to name a few.
How Do You Get Your Visitors To Share Your Content?
What’s your experience with using social share buttons on your website? Do you gamify your online presence? I’d love to hear feedback on what you’ve tried that works or doesn’t work. Leave your comments below!