By Stacy Zemon, “Publisher & Chief Scribe”
“Social optimization” is more than just a matter of adding social sharing buttons to the pages on your website. It encompasses everything from encouraging more sharing on your pages to seeking more feedback from visitors.
To attract more traffic and spark more engagement with prospects and clients, consider these five tips for going beyond buttons on your mobile DJ business website:
1. Encourage a more social experience.
There is a belief that people either share or they don’t. Not so. You can encourage sharing and engagement on your website by choosing “emotionally intelligent words.” This means you select words that represent the personality of your brand and appear conversational.
A good example would be changing a “Book us now” link to “Ready to give us a whirl?” This evokes an action and also makes the click more of a personal experience for the user. Making it personal, in turn, can help users feel more comfortable about leaving a comment or sharing on your site.
2. Raise the bar on quality content.
Creating distinctive content that your prospects find interesting and useful is, of course, key to any successful online marketing strategy. Without such content, there’s less chance that your pages will be discovered and linked to by other sites.
Improving the quality of your content is one way to make your site more social. Think about it. Do you have a blog with concise posts that are relevant and helpful to potential and current clients? Are you creating videos that are worth sharing? Make sure your titles are enticing, and be sure to integrate your sharing buttons closely with your content.
3. Incentivize when feasible.
By incentivizing your visitors with gamification features such as badges, counts and stars, you play to an innate need to compete and win. Ask yourself what can be tweaked on your site to incentivize sharing. Maybe it’s something as simple as ratings or voting. I don’t know of any DJ companies that are currently using gamification on their websites.
One example of successful incentivizing would be to invite visitors to vote on which event enhancement they like best (e.g., photobooths, nighclub style dancefloor lighting, first dance on a cloud, customized wedding party introductions, etc.) Encourage prospects and clients to promote the event enhancement they like best to family, friends and business associates who are planning or who will be planning events themselves. This idea helps engage prospects and clients, and increases visits to your site, which can translate into more sales meetings and bookings.
4. Actively seek feedback.
When was the last time you asked potential clients if there was anything else they’d like for their event that you aren’t already offering? Don’t underestimate the power of feedback. Crowdsourcing on your site can help encourage users to be social both with you and each other.
Feedback is client engagement. When future clients read feedback from visitors and past clients, it can also become testimonials for your DJ service. When it comes to this topic, it pays to take a lesson from the success of sites like The knot and Wedding Wire.
5. Track diligently and make adjustments.
Success often comes down to a more strategic process of testing and making adjustments. To boost engagement on your site, test such factors as where sharing buttons go and which kind of messages encourage client interaction. Most sites have Google Analytics or other research tools, but few are using them to track social media traffic and better understand how people are engaging on their site. Simple changes such as using more direct language can often boost social activity.
Mobile DJ businesses that refuse to test and adjust their social optimization strategies will find that engagement can quickly fizzle and competitors will gladly connect with their former fans. So, making your website more social now will put you ahead of the curve in our industry, and give you a leap up on the competition.
