Did you know that, according to a 2016 survey, around 76% of B2C companies and 88% of B2B companies in North America use content marketing techniques to create engaging content?
As the market shifts from traditional to digital platforms, several brands are on their toes to keep their audiences engaged, thereby increasing their recall values. To keep the audience engaged, brands invest a lot in content.
“Content is king.” We have heard this phrase numerous times, but there is a catch:
It is not just any content. An engaging and gripping content that can hold the attention of the reader from the first word to the last. But can you keep your audience engaged without knowing a plan? Well, the answer is no!
It is not just any content. An engaging and gripping content that can hold the attention of the reader from the first word to the last. But can you keep your audience engaged without knowing a plan? Well, the answer is no!
You need to have a clear plan to execute a successful content marketing strategy, and to do that, you need to create engaging content. In this blog, we will discuss a comprehensive guide on how to create high-quality and engaging content for your audience.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing has been a buzzword in recent years and has emerged as the future of marketing in the digital economy. It is considered a great way to get people to talk about your brand by engaging them as readers and then converting these readers into customers.
This new-age digital marketing technique involves the creation and distribution of relevant, useful content. The content could be blogs, newsletters, social media posts, white papers, emails, videos, etc. Typically, this content is specially curated for current and potential consumers. If content marketing is done right, it helps in building trust among audiences about your brand.
Content marketing is a roadmap to creating engaging content by creating strategies, techniques, and secrets. These tactics not only engage your consumers but they even keep your audience informed and captivated. Which later may compel them to act.
Now that we have an understanding of content marketing, let us understand the importance of creating SEO-friendly, engaging content.
Why is it important to have engaging content in the digital age?
The Internet is flooded with information, and in this endless sea of content, you must be wondering how your content can soar. Well, the answer to it is simple:
The thing that makes your content different is engaging content. Content with which users engage marks a successful digital marketing campaign. Engaging content grabs your audience's attention and develops curiosity among them while keeping them hooked. Generally, this engagement converts passive readers into customers.
The thing that makes your content different is engaging content. Content with which users engage marks a successful digital marketing campaign. Engaging content grabs your audience's attention and develops curiosity among them while keeping them hooked. Generally, this engagement converts passive readers into customers.
Moreover, engaging content not only keeps your audience but is good for your search engine optimization (SEO). Good quality content is favored by search engines, which means that your content will rank higher. By increasing your ranking, your site will get higher online visibility.
What are the guidelines for creating engaging content?
We all create content however, we see that not all content gets engagement. To achieve that, you must follow some guidelines, which may include:
Understanding Your Audience:
Before you create your content, you must be aware of your audience, their needs, their interest, and their pain. Only by knowing your audience can you curate content that they can feel connected to. This connection can help them gain trust for your brand to foster a relationship between you and your audience.
To understand your audience, you can conduct surveys and questionnaires, and analyze the social media platforms and website analytics tools. Surveys and questionnaires help you understand what your audience wants. Whereas social media analysis helps to understand the demographics, interests, and behavior of your audience. Website analytics helps you get details of your visitors and the type of content they engage with.
Create A Content Strategy:
Once you understand your audience, the next step is to create a content strategy. Content strategy is the roadmap that facilitates content creation efforts. A well-researched content strategy enables you to create content ideas that align with your business tone and audience needs. Apart from aligning with your audience, a good strategy helps you to provide a consistent voice and message to your audience across different platforms.
To create a powerful strategy, you must set the goals you wish to achieve with your content. The goal could be anything, like increasing your website traffic, boosting brand awareness, or generating leads.
Once you set the goal, you must understand what your audience wants and their problems, and the type of content they resonate well with. You have a plethora of content types to choose from, like blogs, infographics, videos, and reels.
Once you have decided on the content, create a content calendar that will help you to organize your content and post it consistently.
Once the content is posted, you can evaluate the content’s performance and adjust your strategy.
Choose Different Content Formats:
Content can be presented in different formats to the audience, but it is crucial to select the most appropriate content format. While videos and reels have high engagement, blogs are good for SEO and for sharing informational content. On the other hand, infographics are popular among professionals as they make complex content simple and can be shared easily.
You must choose the appropriate content format carefully. By choosing the right content format, you take a step closer to engaging better with your audience. Also, a correct content format can help you keep the content exciting and fresh for your audience.
Try Storytelling:
We all love listening to stories, then why not incorporate this style for content? We all find ourselves in stories, stories are something that makes the content human. The storytelling technique has a great impact on audiences as audiences connect with this type of content at an emotional level. Well-crafted story content can keep the audience hooked and can transform simple content into a captivating narrative. By connecting with your audiences at an emotional level, you can engage well with them while making the content more memorable and impactful for them.
While story content resonates with audiences, you must tell the story well by crafting a story that resonates with your audience's aspirations, challenges, and journey. The story must be real and should reflect your brand values. The language used must be descriptive to engage with the emotions of the audience. The story must be clear.
Use Conversational Language:
While storytelling is a great way to connect emotionally by adding a conversational tone, you build trust among your audience. The two-way dialogue helps to instill a feeling among your audiences that your brand is not just talking to them, but your brand is also listening to what your audiences have to say, like a friend. To achieve this, you can use a personal tone by using I and you. Apart from that, you can also add questions that may encourage your readers to think and engage with your content by encouraging them to comment on your posts. However, you must understand that getting comments is not the end, you must be proactive and respond to the comments at the earliest.
Include Visuals:
Studies show that visual content has better recall value than textual information. Also, visual content is more engaging and less complex than text, making it easily digestible for your audiences. Through visual content, you can explain complex concepts more readily.
You can include images to add color and interest to your content while making it more visually appealing. Infographics are another great way to present information clearly and concisely in a shareable format. Charts are again visual content types that decades of complex data into a visual format for better understanding. Apart from images, charts, and infographics, videos are another form of visual content that can keep your audience engaged and entertained.
Refresh Your Content Regularly:
We often overlook refreshing the content regularly. With time, the content may lose its charm, or become outdated or irrelevant. Therefore, to remain relevant and engaging, you must refresh your content regularly. By refreshing your content regularly, you not only keep your audience engaged but also boost your SEO ranking and visibility.
You can refresh your content by updating outdated data and adding your insights that you have gained over time. You can even add visuals to refresh your content and make your content a bit more colorful and less complex. You can then share your refreshed content as a social media post or newsletter for better engagement.
Include Best SEO Practice:
By ensuring to include best SEO practices, you increase the visibility of your content. Just imagine if you have created a piece, but your online visibility is low, will you get views? The answer is NO, best SEO practices help you rank high on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The better you rank, the more your content’s visibility and traffic. Higher traffic allows you to engage with more people who visit your site.
Some of the best SEO practices you must consider include the usage of relevant keywords at proper positions in an organic manner. Creating backlinks from credible sources and optimizing the website for mobile are also some of the best SEO practices.
Analyze Your Content’s Performance
Sometimes, despite creating engaging content, you see that your audience is not engaging with it. If that is the case for your content, too, you must reconsider checking the performance metrics. By checking the performance of your content, you can derive insights into how your audiences are reacting to your content.
The performance of content can be measured through different key metrics like page views, time spent on the page, bounce rates, comments, likes, shares, and conversion. By understanding your audience’s behavior, you can tweak the content for better user engagement.
What should you publish?
We all like a variety of things. It is the variety that keeps us engaged and hooked to different content. So, if you are planning to keep your users engaged with your content, you must plan pillar content that is either educational, entertaining, inspiring, or promoting your brand.
Keeping the pillar content in mind, you must begin planning what type of content you are publishing and when. You must ensure to mix the content from different content pillars to keep the content engaging.
When should you publish?
Another question that comes to our mind after deciding what to publish is when to publish our content. Well! Sometimes decoding this answer can be tedious. However, by studying the engagement of your post for about 30 days, you can determine the best time for posting. By studying the behavior of your audience, you get to know when your audience engages best with your brand. Generally, an e-commerce platform tends to share its newsletter with its audience on Wednesday morning or Thursday afternoon. This is because generally people do not open emails sent on weekends, and Monday and Friday are typically busy days for professionals.
However, this metric can change based on audience and location.
Brands That Did A Great Job In Keeping Their Audiences Engaged
Consumer engagement is essential to keep your brand afloat in this digital generation. Some brands that are killing it in keeping their audiences engaged are:
Wendy’s:
Wendy’s witty presence on X (formerly Twitter) has kept its audience engaged. The roasts and comebacks are excellent examples of content engagement. Wendy’s has cleverly and subtly created an engagement strategy that never fails to engage its customers playfully. These playful interactions of the brand with its consumers help in building relationships of the brand with its audiences in a lighthearted way.
BMW:
BMW for Joy used storytelling techniques to build an emotional connection with people for its brand. The brand encouraged people to share their stories, thereby strengthening its brand and consumer relationship. The strong brand and consumer relationship turned several consumers of BMW into its brand advocates.
The impact of BMW Joy, launched in 2010, was so immense that this car was the most asked-for present for Christmas by kids.
Nike+app:
Breaking the old badge that Nike carried of being a sports apparel brand, the Nike+ app helped the brand to project itself as a sports and fitness resource, by focusing on consumer engagement.
The app has taken customer engagement to a new level. By leveraging technology, a fitness package, and a personalized fitness approach, this app stands out as an example of successful customer engagement.
This app enables consumers to track their workouts, set goals, and even share personalized recommendations on the app. This app is an example of successful customer engagement.
Conclusion:
Consumer engagement is a great way to engage with consumers. A good engagement strategy is good for better brand recall and in the long run, it is great for SEO too. By incorporating certain factors like understanding your audience, creating a content strategy, using storytelling techniques, choosing the correct content format, including visuals, using conversational language, refreshing your content, and using best SEO practices, you can increase the engagement on your blogs.
Apart from using the guidelines, you must be aware that you must mix different types of content, like educational, entertaining, promotional, and inspiring content. Also, you must know when to post content so that it resonates with your audience. Wendy’s, BMW, and Nike+ app are some excellent examples of engaging content strategies.
Finally, creating engaging content is not just a trend but a strategic imperative for brands seeking sustained success in the digital era. As the digital landscape evolves, brands must continue to adapt and innovate their content strategies to stay connected with their audiences and thrive in the competitive digital marketplace.
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