How can we define what engaging content is; is it about fancy buzz words, being ‘on-trend’, and crossing our fingers in the hope our content will go viral?
The simple answer is no.
Engaging content, when it comes right down to it, is informative, relevant, inspiring, and interesting to the reader. And creating engaging content is pretty simple if we follow the basics.
Creating Engaging Content – 3 Simple Tips
Here we are going to look at 3 simple tips which are in a way the basics of content marketing. And if you are looking at creating engaging content for your audience, content where you see interaction and sharing, then all you need to do is follow these basics.
Be Creative
Creative content is a bit of a balancing act; you’ll need to ensure that the content you’re writing is factual, and backed up by appropriate data, but you don’t want it to read like a corporate wall of text.
Creativity comes in many forms, and doesn’t necessarily have to focus entirely on script itself. Think about it this way, if you were to visit a website of interest, would you feel more engaged and prompted to read further if the content you were viewing was bold, bright, and split up into easy to read sections with related imagery?
Yes, of course you would! Add a video in there too? Bring it on!
The human eye is naturally drawn towards colors (images and videos), and the brain processes information much more easily if there are clear separators in the content you are viewing.
Colors influence perception to a great extent and this is pretty evident from this study on some of the logos. Hence it is recommended that you use colors in your content.
That’s not to say that your content should be displayed like a children’s book, but if you put yourself in your user’s shoes, you’d probably want to see some color and definition in what you’re reading.
Matt Bowman of Forbes.com recently suggested that embedding videos on your website’s landing pages can increase conversion by 80%. When you consider that YouTube receives 1 billion visitors every month, people are obviously drawn to videos.
Whether you’re telling a story, sharing something personal, or providing a tutorial, videos are a great way to grab your reader’s attention, and there are plenty of tools available on the internet to help you achieve some stunning results.
If the content you want to get across is potentially complex, and hard to put into digestible text, info-graphics could be the answer to your problem.
You can provide the same amount of information as originally intended, whilst allowing the user to visualize your content in a much more user-friendly fashion.
Don’t worry if you’re not graphically advanced, there are various tools available that will do all the hard work for you.
Know your audience
Knowing your audience is a real key to success when creating engaging content. It may sound simple, but often, as it is in our nature, we can get carried away when writing content, to the point it no longer targets your chosen audience.
It’s very common to disconnect from your readers, causing your content to fail to resonate with your audience, but fear not, this can be resolved!
Ensure you conduct enough market research to know your audience, after all, they’re the people that are going to read your content, so making them happy should be a top priority.
Content marketing is all about creating engaging content that creates an emotional connection, not shares on Facebook or re-tweets on Twitter; your audience should feel something deep inside when reading your content, encouraging them to come back and read more.
One of the best ways to engage with your audience is to actually engage with them; ask them questions that prompt responses, request reviews or experiences about your products, and always make sure you respond to them. It’s no good reaching out, then failing at the last hurdle.
Actionable Content
Once you have engaging content, you’ll want some of it to be actionable. What we mean by that is, people can do something with it; this is where social media often comes into play.
As well as being engaging, it can be a great way for your users/viewers to get your content seen and heard, reaching new audiences.
Actionable content doesn’t have to be confusing, and it doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, it can be as simple as creating a newsletter that your users can sign up to, receiving updates and more engaging content via email on a weekly or monthly basis.
Creating a template for your newsletter requires some creativity (referring back to point 1), and there are plenty of tools online to help you do this.
Most web hosting providers will often come with a built-in, free website builder which will allow you to add plugins, such as, social links and newsletters, so your actionable content can be dealt with in one place.
Your actionable content will depend entirely on your own goals for your business; your marketing strategy should cover what you’re aiming for, but can certainly be improved with actions.
Whether it’s a competition, a question, social media following, or a newsletter, your content will only be engaging if your audiences engages with it.
About the Author:
Jann is a Content Writer at ukwebhostreview.com – She is committed to providing all you need to know about technology along with researching and analysing the best hosting providers.
Usually I never comment on Blogs but your article is so convincing that I never stop myself to say something about it. You’re doing a great job Man,Keep it up.