Guest author Yoav Vilner is a cofounder of Ranky.
Launching a startup is no easy task. While there’s certainly tremendous hype about the tech sector, the truth is that the overwhelming majority of startups fail—mostly because of a lack of market and resources.
Solidifying your market can be particularly difficult in an overcrowded landscape. Simply getting the word out and attaining loyal users can be a challenge, but they’re critical for your business success.
See also: The Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make
To earn loyal users, you must actively seek connection with your potential client base. Projecting expertise in your field and actively promoting communication and user involvement are great ways to do build an online community that lives and breaths your brand. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways to accomplish that.
If increasing user engagement is on your radar (as it should be), here are some of my favorite tools to help you achieve a high success rate.
Spot.im
There’s a lot of talk about social media’s role in marketing. Social media is a great place for your brand’s conversations, but there’s one problem with it: It holds conversations somewhere else, rather than on your site. You want visitors coming to your site and, more importantly, sticking around.
Spot.im is an onsite social outlet that is convenient, fun, and accessible. It resides on your own website, but still offers your users get the ultimate social experience. With comments, newsfeed, chats, and private messaging, users can stay up to date, engage, and develop a sense of community right on your site.
The connections you develop with such tools can be extremely dynamic. Because your users can engage online conversations about your brand, they discover useful information about your offerings while cultivating relationships with like-minded people. This gives them a positive impression of your business, and projects a company image that’s open, human and conversational, rather than simply working in its own interest.
Nimble
The key to effective user engagement is cultivating relationships with your users, often through email, social media, newsletters, blogging, and more. Finding the time for it can be a challenge, especially for startup leaders. Thankfully, Nimble makes it much easier.
The service merges your social media accounts, emails, contact information, and other communication channels, making for an easy way to track and manage conversations, and develop a more meaningful connection with clients.
Bounce Exchange
Some marketers are obsessed with bounce rates. But they’re not a particularly good reflection of your user engagement. The reasons are obvious: If people are choosing to leave, they are not satisfied with what they see on your site.
So what if you could stop users in their tracks right before they left, or figure out why they leave? That’s the purpose of Bounce Exchange. This simple tool not only lets you derive contact information, but it helps you capture potential customers at the last optimal point to drive them back to your site.
Consider it a last-minute, second chance at connecting to users—one that also helps you figure out what features you can add or remove in order to turn casual browsers into fans.
Hubspot
Hubspot brands itself as the ultimate inbound marketing tool, and for good reason. The software helps bring users in and keeps them loyal across various stages in the sale process and multiple methods, such as content, landing, pages, social media, and analytics.
Boosting your engagement can make a profound impact on your startup’s success. Obviously, if you can elevate your brand’s connection to its customers, you can keep your fans coming back for more.
Photo by n.karim
