Ultimately, user engagement is how you connect with your audience. Without user engagement, it’s difficult to build a relationship with your customers, foster any sort of brand recognition and generate conversions. The more onsite engagement, the more likely users are to trust your brand. If users aren’t interacting with your brand online, why would they make a purchase, request a quote, or learn more about your organization?
While website functionalities alone can’t entirely be responsible for user engagement with your digital presence, there are some elements that are essential. Certain elements encourage engagement, and the way your website functions goes hand in hand with how users interact with it.
To help facilitate user engagement and grow your business online, you need a strategic website design approach. Below are 3 essential online elements that are an integral aspect of engagement:
1. Enticing Calls to Action
Whatever the objective of your website may be, you should have CTAs (calls to action) that align with them. These CTAs are how you capture the interest of users and bring them further down the conversion funnel as their relationship with your brand grows stronger.
That being said, not any CTA will do the job at engaging your website visitors. Simply stating “learn more” isn’t compelling enough to make users want to continue engaging with your brand. Instead, use a CTA that holds a real value and is indicative of what the user can expect upon clicking it.
2. High-Quality Blog Content
If you’re a B2B or B2C, you should have an active blog that sheds light on your industry and area of expertise. A blog is an excellent outlet for you to help build trust with users and shape you and your employees as industry leaders. Stick to a consistent schedule and cover topics that perform best time and time again. If your users can rely on your brand to always have fresh and up-to-date information on your website, they’ll return. Second and third time visitors are always more likely to convert than a first time visitor, so engaging users time and time again is important to business growth. You need to provide users with a valid reason to do so, and for most brands, a well-written and relevant blog is the best tactic to do so.
3. Social Media Integration
To get users interacting with your brand online, social media is an area that can’t be overlooked. Social media allows your brand to connect with users in a way that infiltrates their personal lives. Sharing content on social media, and simply engaging with your brand on social is an essential element of user engagement. While things like Twitter chats and always being responsive to comments and questions on a Facebook page are incredibly important, one of the simplest onsite elements you can focus on to encourage engagement is to integrate social media signals into the design of your blog.
House buttons for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or whatever social platforms are most relevant to users on each of your blog posts to make it the simplest experience possible for users to share a post they found valuable. Eliminating the extra step that users have to take, and presenting them with the tools they need to share immediately as they read an article can make a massive difference in the shares that your content will receive.
User Engagement On Your Website
User engagement is important, there’s no doubt about it. And truthfully, it’s not something that is limited to simply your website. However, with engagement spanning across multiple channels and platforms, your website should have a consistent presence that your other channels drive back to. At its core, a website is a marketing tool, and should be used as such. Taking a few simple steps to optimize your website for user engagement is essential and can offer plenty of benefits to brands that do so correctly.

Gabriel Shaoolian is the CEO and founder of New York-based Blue Fountain Media, a digital agency focused on generating qualified leads, increasing sales and expanding brand recognition for clients online.