Retaining your audience’s attention is more difficult than gathering that audience. And doing so by utilizing content is even harder. Factors like short attention spans, an abundance of information, and content preference make it hard for marketers to get users to engage with their content.
But rest assured because, with a few simple tricks, you should be able to overcome this hurdle without a problem. This article will shed light on these tricks or strategies that content marketers can use to increase their audience engagement rates.
The Potential of Content Marketing
Some of you might be thinking, what makes content marketing so important? To answer this, we will share some interesting statistics with you so that you can understand how much potential this marketing medium holds.
- 73% of B2B and 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing in their overall digital marketing strategy.
- Content marketing generates 3x leads compared to traditional methods and costs 62% less.
- 67% of marketers report that content marketing helps generate leads. Also, 72% say that it helps build loyalty among existing customers.
(Sources: Search Engine Journal, Ahrefs)
Are you motivated and ready to explore the benefits of content marketing? If so, then implement these strategies and step up your online marketing plan.
Content Marketing Strategies
The techniques mentioned below are the most effective if you want to increase your audience’s engagement. When that happens, your conversion rate and overall SEO performance will also be improved.
Because of its abundance and common usage, we have discussed strategies for written content only.
1. Provide Audience-Preferred Content
In order to effectively leverage content for marketing, you need to keep your audience’s preference in mind. What do they want to know about? Ask yourself that question and write accordingly.
To get this information, though, you will have to perform extensive research. Here are some tips to understand the type of content your audience will most probably like.
- Evaluate the demographics of your target audience (age, location, marital status, etc.)
- Research your audience’s common Google searches.
- Monitor the social media activity of your potential audience.
- See who your audience follows online to understand the type of content they prefer.
All these research tactics will lead you to understand your users. Once you know that, you can craft content that would greatly interest your audience. In other words, they will engage with your work more.
2. Utilize Exciting Visuals
Written content might be the most commonly used type of content for marketing. However, a majority of online users don’t prefer plain text at all. They want quick solutions and effective sources of information.
That’s because you need to embellish your work with eye-catching visuals. An explanatory image or statistic-displaying infographic can considerably increase the engagement rate of your write-up.
3. Create Catchy Headlines
The headings of your article also have a great influence on user engagement. If they find your headline exciting, they are bound to read what is written inside. In other words, creating eye-catching headlines is of great importance.
But what makes a headline attractive? Well, it depends on various factors. For example, the type of your content and the nature of your audience. But a few general tricks to hook a reader with the help of a headline are given in the following:
- Write your headline in question form and provide its answer underneath.
- Describe your passages in the most descriptive manner possible.
- Use the key phrase of a passage as a heading
- Use easy wording so the reader immediately understands what you mean
If you follow these simple tricks, you can make your audience engage with your content more.
4. Add Cited Information from Trusted Sources
According to an online source, 52% of marketers believe that inserting backlinks can increase rankings on search engines. This clarifies the importance of linking in content marketing.
These links are important for you in two ways:
- First, they provide valuable information to your users and help increase engagement rates.
- Second, they increase your site’s credibility in the search engine’s eyes.
In this way, you can kill two birds with one stone. However, you should not think of backlinks as a search engine ranking factor only. This mindset might lead you to use irrelevant information in your write-up.
5. Use Interactive Media
Interactive media is the new popular thing to get users to engage with your content. This may include:
- Polls
- QnAs
- Reviews
- Interactive images with animations
Things like these encourage users to spend longer on your content and ultimately increase engagement. Other than that, you can also get great insights into your users’ opinions with the help of such media.
For example, you can set a poll to see which type of articles your audience prefers. The result of this poll can help you decide what type of article to write next. And when you write such an article, a large proportion of users should be interested in it.
6. Promote Content on Social Media
You won’t see much progress if you adopt a singular marketing channel approach. That’s why you need to promote your content on every medium that you can. Social media is a great place for promoting your written content.
However, you cannot post lengthy blogs and articles there. You will have to shorten those posts or use their summarized version in social media post captions. Summarizing can include:
- Using the best line from a write-up
- Explaining key points of the write-up
- Shortening the whole write-up by explaining its main purpose
If these tasks look doable, then well and good. But you can automate this process if you have more important things to worry about. Online tools are available that can summarize your text in an efficient manner.
7. Optimize Content to Perfection
Before publishing content on any online source, you must ensure that it is flawless. There shouldn’t be any sort of incorrect information, writing errors, or readability issues. In order to find these mistakes, you will have to proofread your work properly.
Writing errors are generally easy to find. For example, if you have incorrectly used grammar, you will be able to spot it immediately. Eliminate such errors by replacing the incorrect words with appropriate ones.
The same goes for readability errors. Such errors aren’t grammar-related, but they make the overall reader experience quite unpleasant. To remove these errors, you can paraphrase your content. This will bring clarity to your writing and make it understandable.
If you have proficient literature skills, you can paraphrase by yourself. However, to save time and avoid mental strain, you can use an online sentence rephraser.
FAQs
Here is some further explanation about content marketing and user engagement.
How does content marketing improve customer engagement?
With the help of content marketing, you convey useful information about a topic or your products to your audience. Anyone who is interested in interacting with your online business needs to engage with such content to understand what you do.
What are the 3 Rs of content marketing?
The three Rs of content marketing include reducing, repurposing, and recycling. This means that you should provide quality content, even if it is in a rather minimal quantity. Such qualitative content can then be repurposed to be used elsewhere.
What is an example of content engagement?
An example of content engagement is when you publish a blog and your audience reads it all. This is an ideal case situation that you should aim to achieve.
Final Words
To conclude, suggest that you follow all the above strategies. If you implement them correctly, you can unleash the maximum potential of content. When you do that, you can reach your end goals of digital marketing, like getting more conversions or increasing your online presence in general.
Leave a comment!