Thanks to technology and our “if-you-want-it-you-can-get-it-now” world, human attention span is at the lowest ever. That means you have only a few seconds to engage your visitors and capture their attention before they’re on to the next thing. 

How to Engage Your Visitors in 30 Seconds or Less

While that may be discouraging, we also have more tools and strategies than ever to reach our audiences anytime, anywhere, and with the right information. When thinking about engaging your visitors, it’s important to capture their attention to quickly convert them.

Why 30 seconds? A UK study shows that potential customers will only entertain (and of course, hopefully, absorb) marketing material for 30 seconds. Because people are often on multiple devices at a time these days, the past idea that people would sit through a few minutes of commercials between programming is no longer the case. Their attention is now diverted between devices.

Thirty seconds might not seem like a lot of time, but that’s the time you have to capture the attention of your audience. That means you have to use your time wisely to capitalize the attention of your audience as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Here are a few tips and strategies to engage your visitors and grab their focus while you can:

Engage Your Visitors By Knowing Your Audience

You need a foundation of information about who your website visitors actually are so that you can create marketing just for them and their preferences. That foundation should be built from data about your audience, but there’s no doubt that it can be difficult to collect data, especially since privacy concerns continue to grow. That being said, audiences are often willing to give up their data to companies they trust.

To gain that trust, you need to build a relationship with your website visitors by providing compelling and useful data to them. Define what audiences you should target, then start building content that you think they will engage with. Continuously refer to your data to understand what content they are consuming and why.

Then build more content that aligns with those trends so that audiences keep consuming your data and start to consider you a thought leader within your industry.

As your website visitors begin to trust you, you can slowly start to gather more and more information on them so you can keep providing the content that they need.

That way you engage your visitors and build a relationship with them – you become an indispensable resource for your audience, which makes them loyal to your brand.

 Make It Easy for People to Engage

One thing people often ignore when trying to reach their audience is the technical aspect of their website. Just as important as content, website usability and accessibility can make or break an interaction with a visitor in only a few seconds. If a website doesn’t load fast enough, links don’t work, or isn’t a good experience, visitors will exit pretty quickly.

Your website SEO is not just important for Google rankings, it is immensely important to engage your visitors and provide a great experience to everyone who visits your website. To make sure your website is running smoothly, do a quick SEO audit – tools like SEMRush or Moz can help you do just that.

Google Search Console is also a great resource for understanding how smoothly your website’s SEO is running. Learn more about how to optimize your on-page SEO, check out our blog.

Engage Your Visitors By Making it Personal

Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences and 90% indicate that they find personalization appealing. Personalization creates a better brand experience for the visitor, which encourages brand loyalty and eventually increases revenue.

Personalized messaging should be delivered to engage your visitors through the channels they want, the timing they want, with the content they want to provide the best experience. Often, these tasks can be automated through marketing automation and your CRM – technology can help you scale this process to make things easier on a workload level but still provide a personalized experience to your website visitors.

Engage Your Vistors By Telling Your Story

Neuroscience shows that the human brain is “wired” to listen to stories. Stories are vital to the development of the human brain, and that because that is the way our brain is trained to work, we tend to be drawn to them. Tell your brand story to your visitors to gain their attention. Even better – tell the story of one of your brand advocates.

By focusing attention on one of your audience members, it will create a bond with them so they will continue to be loyal to your brand, and at the same time, it will engage your other audience members.

People love to hear stories about others like themselves, and taking it one step further, they will strive to attain a relationship with your brand so that maybe one day you can tell their story as well.

Engage Your Vistors By Keeping It Simple

No matter what kind of content you’re creating to attract your audience, one thing is most important – keep it simple and get straight to the point. Website visitors know what they are looking for and brands that give them the run-around won’t get the time of day.

Turns out people that visit your site don’t even really read your content. According to research, they usually just scan. That means you should make your content scannable – bullets, highlights, bolding, and headings will help break up big paragraphs.

Engage your visitors by getting straight to the point and give them exactly what they’re looking for.

SEE ALSO: Top SEO Best Practices for Digital Branding

Final Thoughts on Engaging Your Visitors

The facts are there – you only have a quick moment to connect and engage your visitors so you can capture their attention quickly to keep them loyal. Audiences are becoming increasingly selective about what they tune into and for how long, and it’s your job to cut through the noise to get them to notice you.

What’s your go-to strategy to engage your visitors quickly and effectively? Comment below…