I’m not a frequent restaurant-goer, but I do go to restaurants with my family once in a while. While I enjoy (most) of the food served, what always intrigued me is how the owners and staffs engage their new and established customers. Learning from them helps me to establish new understanding on the whole issue of visitor engagement. Here’s what I learn.
Lesson #1: A busy restaurant means good food (or at least you can assume so…)
…well, it’s not always like that, but when I look for a new restaurant to visit, I always look at how full is the parking lot or how long is the queue. Although I’m not sure about the food quality, but at least I get the impression that the restaurant does offer some quality – hence the long line and full parking lot.
As a website owner myself, I’m aware that my content quality can’t speak by itself. “Just build it and they will come” mindset won’t work today. I’m not sure that the general SEO advice – great content bait links – is giving you the whole picture. Well, really – it’s not; if you want to do link baiting, you need catch people’s attention; great content is just one part of the whole story.
To explain: Will the food quality gets you customer? No, not by itself: You need to get people to visit your restaurant to give your food a try; then you will find a way to keep them returning AND say good words about your food (also the atmosphere, service quality, and so on…) to others.
Lesson #2: Growing your website, quality does matter, but visitor engagement is paramount
So what a restaurant owner has got to do? He will need to launch an opening party. Perhaps free meal for everyone on the launch day? Perhaps a 50 percent off for the first month of the launch? Not stopping there, he will need to let people know about the launch party and discounts.
He will also need to serve the new customers with great food, great atmosphere and great service – all with a hope that they will return and tell their friends to visit. You can also offer them a discount if they can bring a friend to eat at his restaurant.
Let’s go back to your website; you see, great content CAN get you visitors. But in order for them to visit and read your great content, yours need to be found first. This can be achieved via various methods, all related to Inbound Marketing: SEO, social media marketing, freebies, and so on – all with a hope that people will come to your site.
But not stopping there, you will need to serve your incoming visitors, just like a restaurant owner does: You need to offer great content and great “atmosphere”, such as clean navigation, great design, and an engaging community. Everything is important, but you need to put emphasis on that last part… visitor engagement in a vibrant online community.
Lesson #3: Don’t let your visitors stranded – facilitate engagement
As I mentioned early in this post, I always intrigued how a restaurant owner and his staffs engage customers: Simple questions like “How’s our food? How’s our service?” can give a strong impression that the restaurant cares about the customers. Some restaurants take that even further; some restaurant owners and managers talk with me about the restaurant; the new menu, the latest renovation… even some talks about the hottest local issue… all give customers feel they are well accepted. Visiting such restaurants will always attract me to come back – and bring my family and colleagues along with me.
Learning from those great restaurants, as a website owner, your intriguing content can spark talks about it; however, more likely than not, you actually need to facilitate that: You need to interact with your community members – replying to their comments as soon as possible, responding to their feedback, addressing their concerns, sparking positive discussion, and so on.
When you own a large site with thousands of visitors a day and hundreds of comments to respond to, you might need help from a community manager and/or staffs who will help with your community engagement endeavor. Taking care of your visitors who are giving their time and thought on your posts and articles is only logical for you to do.
Takeaway
Is your website giving you a warm, fuzzy feeling visiting on the site by having a community which members warmly welcome you and really respond to your comments? If so, congratulations – you have more valuable assets than a mere search engine ranking! And yes, when you have an engaging community, you can stop depending on Google and the likes for traffic! An engaging community can buzz your brand and content everywhere; the members are your evangelists.
And eventually, an engaged community member will mention you – and link to you; her colleagues, friends and family might be linking to you as well. And without focusing on link baiting, your content will actually get people link to you – why? It’s because your content has an active, engaging community!
What if your community members are experts in your niche? What if they have thousands of followers, believing every word they say? Imagine what will happen to your website if they mention your website and say some good words to their followers.
Well, stop imagining, and start taking action – focus on visitor engagement and work on growing and engaging your online community! (We can help you with this, by the way…)
