Do you love listening to your favorite poetry on podcasts and YouTube webcasts? Do you often find yourself hooked to books by bestselling authors or even Hollywood flicks? Happens to most of us, right? Have you wondered why?
It’s because some content types are highly engaging. The world is full of content right now. Visit Google, type your questions, and you’ll get many options to choose from: blog posts, videos, ebooks, etc. Check out the guide above to learn about creating SEO content that converts.
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Each published content piece is competing for audience attention. Make yours the most engaging and you’ll get a bigger following.
Are you still finding it hard to make your branded content stand out from the crowd?
Let’s learn some key ways for businesses to create compelling content that attracts higher engagement and more conversions:
Ask questions
You must have come across many quizzes and contests that are extremely interesting. Do you know why? Because that makes the audience think and take action.
As a brand, you want to facilitate a two-way interaction with your audience. Whether you’re writing a blog post or creating a video, asking questions is a creative way to get your audience involved. By asking interesting questions, you can create pure engagement posts something similar to the following LinkedIn update:
Tell stories
Do you remember your favorite teacher back in school? Most students had one because they told the best stories.
Stories are as old as the human race. We tell stories to inspire and influence. Telling stories infuses entertainment in education. It takes away the dullness out of a boring piece of content. As a marketer, you can tell a variety of stories:
a. How did you get the idea for starting your business?
b. The success and failures that were a part of your journey.
c. Stories related to big client wins and industry awards.
d. The making of your product.
e. The people behind your company.
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The audience wants to see the human side of your business. Story-driven content helps you showcase your brand’s journey, and it helps to build a relationship with the audience.
Know what your audience wants
One of the skills that you’ll profit from as a content marketer is empathy for the consumer. Knowing who your audience is and what they’re looking for is an integral part of creating engaging content.
SEO-friendly content isn’t about stuffing keywords; it’s about producing user-friendly and insightful content, like the video above describes.
Surround yourself with inspiration
Remember, even the best of content writers and marketers can’t produce great content out of thin air. The best way to stay inspired all the time includes:
Solid research is at the heart of a winning content piece; content research should be a part of your everyday routine. Keep yourself brimming with ideas, and that will add to your content’s quality.
Make your content soulful
There may be many debates about quality vs. quantity. With so many content pieces out there, you can’t replace quality with quantity. Remember, creating content is about soliciting emotional reactions.
Brands like Redbull and Starbucks are live examples of content that strike a chord with the audience and make them come back for more.
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Measuring and improving content engagement
When you apply the above content creation techniques, you’ll find a noticeable improvement in the content engagement rate. Measure it using the following metrics, and it’ll be easier to see what’s working best for your business:
Comments: Be it comments on blog posts, YouTube videos or social media status updates, the more, the merrier. Also, track the quality and sentiment of the comments.
Likes and Shares: You can keep tabs on the engagement on your social media posts.
Unique Page Visitors: This is a metric that’s most relevant to websites. Log in to your Google Analytics account to observe the reach of your blog post or your infographic post.
Average Time on Page: Google Analytics also tells you the duration users spend on different content pieces. More time means more content engagement.
Conversion Rate: Most content pieces have a call-to-action (CTA) such as signing up for a newsletter or free trial. A higher conversion rate means more people are convinced to take action.
Based on these metrics, you can compare the published content pieces, then make a list of highly engaging ones to analyze success factors.
Final thoughts
The first goal of content creation is to get potential customers to visit your site. This way, they can get to know your brand. The final aim is to get them to convert. Content engagement helps you get prospects to convert into customers. The level of engagement differentiates stellar content from the mediocre pieces. It’s what enables you to create a loyal audience and many online evangelists who don’t just love your content, but also take pride in sharing it with their peers.
Now you know why content engagement is such an essential part of a winning marketing strategy. So go use it to your advantage!
