If you want to have a successful business, content marketing isn’t optional. Huge corporations and small businesses alike rely on content to communicate with their audience. Anyone can easily write content for their website, but if it’s not done correctly, it won’t do anything to help your business or readers. For your content to be effective, you need to make sure that it will get your audience’s attention. Creating content that users can engage with is the key to getting a piece of content to rank in search engines.
Here’s how you can make your content get high engagement.
Know Your Audience
Content is only good when the right people are consuming your content. If you’ve made an investment in digital marketing or have some skills yourself, you probably already have a good idea of who your target audience is. If you don’t know who makes up your audience, you need to figure it out before you can craft content for them.
You know you’re writing for someone specific, you just need to have a solid understanding of who that is. What are some possible problems they could be having, and how can your business help solve them? Your audience is made up of specific people who will benefit from certain types of content and information, so you need to tailor your information to what will be most useful to them.
Take Time to Plan
A perfect piece of content doesn’t just happen. If you’re excited to start writing blog posts or other pages of content, you might want to start writing right away without setting aside time to plan everything out or research what is ranking. Research and planning is an important step in any content marketing strategy.
Everyone’s writing process is unique, so what you do to prepare yourself to write content might change as you do it more often. Creating a variety of content topics, researching, and outlining your content can not only help with the quality, but it can also make the writing process easier if you’re prepared in advance. The writing will flow naturally.
Even if it’s a topic that you’re an expert in, you’ll likely do some research before or while you write to see what other experts are saying about a similar topic. Creating content that’s SEO-friendly, not just engaging, can take even more planning, and likely more than one person helping out.
Offer Different Topics
After being in your field for a while, you probably have a vast array of knowledge. As an expert in your field, you know a lot of valuable information. Use this to your advantage. If you only offer up different variations of the same few topics, people will lose interest quickly. You want to create content that will make people want to continuously check back for more, which means diversifying your topics. Plus, the more relevant content that you create, the more rankings your website can gain.
Think about assigning different topic clusters to your team members who may specialize in a specific area. The more contributors you have, the more frequently you can publish new content, which can help bring you more traffic as I stated previously.
People reading your content are also going to be at different stages, therefore looking for different topics. Content topics should appeal to people at every stage of the buyer’s journey to make it more impactful. Your website should have content that will speak to everyone in your audience, whether they’re just hearing about your company or are getting close to making a final decision about using your product or service.
Appeal to the Reader’s Emotions
Your content should do more than give readers access to important information. One of the biggest benefits of content is that it allows you to easily connect with your audience. Content allows you to use your voice and show some of your personality to give a human side to your company.
To create engaging content, it needs to appeal to a reader’s emotions in some way. No matter what you’re writing about, you can find an opportunity to share a story they can relate to and identify with, rather than just provide basic information.
Depending on what feels right for you and your industry, you might want to try writing content that feels fun and lighthearted, or something more heartfelt. It might seem difficult to achieve this with some topics, but even content meant only to educate and inform can leave them feeling inspired.
Clean Up Your Work When You’re Finished
Users won’t enjoy reading your content if it’s difficult to read. People will question your trustworthiness if your content has mistakes all over. There are tools available that can point out some of your grammar mistakes like Grammarly, but you also need to read over everything yourself carefully to ensure it all makes sense.
If you reread your work several times, you can easily miss common errors that you might not even realize your making. If you’re able to, you should also have someone else read over your work to catch what you could be missing. Whether you’re just getting into writing content or you’ve been doing this for a while, any feedback and constructive criticism you get is extremely valuable.
One last thing you should consider is consider writing like you are talking to someone in person. Google is doing their best today to understand content and context like a human does. There is no need to get all technical or overdo it. Just simply write in natural language.
Why Does Engaging Content Matter?
It’s easy to fill your website with content, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to help you. Creating high-quality, engaging content, of course, takes time and effort.
Content can help you achieve many of your digital marketing goals, like building brand-awareness, bringing in more traffic, or even gaining quality leads. If you can give readers valuable information that’s enjoyable to read, they’ll want to continue to come back to you for more or reach out for your services.
There’s an overwhelming amount of content available on the internet, which makes it very competitive. Make yours better. See what is ranking for keywords that make sense for you to target and think of how you can add to it to make it more valuable. Don’t copy of course, but use the same gist or outline and outdo the competition with information, originality, and readability.
A lot goes into creating high-quality content that readers will want. Although this can be a lot of work, it’s incredibly worth it. Creating content that will pull your audience in and pique their interest can help get you closer to achieving your digital marketing goals.