Yes, Yes, a Thousand Times Yes: Designing to Engage

The technological developments of the past couple decades, like Google, Facebook, and many others have brought people closer together than ever before, allowing them to maintain relationships and make connections they otherwise couldn’t.

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This isn’t exactly a revolutionary statement, and its implications for businesses are known, but not as well understood. Quality design is one of the most important components for online success, regardless of industry or size, or anything else. While what we have stated is somewhat common knowledge, we believe that it is something that deserves more emphasis and attention.

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And as one of the top graphic designers in the San Francisco Bay Area, we feel as though it is something we are qualified to discuss, so here are a few tips and things to consider to maximize your audience engagement.

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Awareness vs. Engagement

One of the primary mistakes that people make in web design, marketing, and many other disciplines, is not being able to differentiate between awareness and engagement.This distinction is key, and it is something that you should consider from the very beginning. Designing to raise awareness is great, informing them about your services and products, and putting yourself on their radar. But achieving audience engagement requires forethought and intent.

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You can achieve customer engagement any number of ways, but just make sure that you include a clear avenue of engagement for your clients. A call to action, a link to another source, and even more commonly now, a social media interaction, are all satisfactory ways to spur engagement.

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Just be sure that you are setting out to do more than pique your audience’s interest.

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Include Interactive Elements

It is one thing to engage your audience through a third-party source, advertisement, or social media post, but what about when they are already on your site? As an industry leader, and a top web design company in Silicon Valley, we have valuable experience that has informed our opinions on what makes engaging web design.

One particularly useful practice that we can recommend is including interactive elements in your website such as the inclusion of a chatbot or a live chat feature, giving your customers the chance to directly engage with your business should they be interested.

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And as a side note, one of the most important things that you can do to ensure customer engagement is to make your website cross-platform accessible. By not optimizing your website for mobile platforms, you are ruining any chance you have of getting mobile users to engage with your brand via your site.

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Listen to Your Customers

When offering a service or a product, it is important to understand how that product or service is being received by your customers, it is one of the most important components of client engagements.

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If your customers take the time to share things with you, listen to them! This sounds simple enough, but really think about it. So many companies use their social media to churn out generic and self-serving content that most people couldn’t care less about. But the best brands have created online spaces where their customers can publicly air their grievances or share experiences, and expect to receive a genuine and thoughtful response.

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We’re not saying it’s easy, but it’s worth it to try to cultivate spaces where your customers feel comfortable reaching out to you.

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Understand the Value of Design

When it comes to design, development, or outreach, it is important to consider the difference between garnering awareness and driving engagement. Engagement comes from interactive features and meaningful content, and it creates genuinely meaningful experiences for your clients.

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It isn’t exactly the easy way out, but give it a try, you’ll be glad you did.