Creating Content That Engages

Content may be king, but if it’s not engaging; no one will look at it.

As content is king in the online marketing world, it’s worth noting what makes for engaging content.

Plugging infographics and images

When seeding content, infographics are great, as other companies and bloggers tend to pick them up and use them in their blogs and linking back to your site. For the consumers themselves though, infographics turn statistics and various concepts into easily digestible information. It’s engaging, and it also takes a lot less effort to look at an infographic than reading an entire article, or study. Given that an average individual’s attention span is about eight seconds, anything that makes information easier to grasp is a good thing. (1)

Images are a great way to catch someone’s attention on social media. Social media posts with images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only ones. (1)

Another great thing about images is that they can be shared via platforms like Pinterest. If someone lands on your website and reads a blog filled with attractive visuals, they are likely to pin them. That is if they are Pinterest enthusiasts. With 250 million active monthly Pinterest users, chances are some of them will land on your website. Especially, if your target audience includes women, as approximately 80% of Pinterest users are women. (2)

Videos Are Attention Grabbers

If content is king, videos are the shining knights of online marketing — they tend to outperform all other forms of content. Consider this: 1200% more shares are generated by social videos than text and images combined. (3)

In addition to that, 90% of consumers say videos can help them make buying decisions — video on the landing page of a website can increase conversions by up to 80%. Simply including the word ‘video’ in the subject line of an email can increase opening rates by 19%, while having a video in an email leads to 200-300% increase in click-through rates. That’s pretty powerful, don’t you think? (3) (4)

Do Your Research

To create compelling content, knowing your audience is essential. If you’re a smaller business, or just starting out, simple market research is the easiest way to go. If you have access to more cash, then big data is the way forward. Analysing online behaviour has never been easier. Knowing what your clients are doing online and how they interact with your brand, both on social media and your website is important to be able to grow sales. Mainly because customers have grown to expect tailored experiences.

In short, get to know your audience because content should speak to your audience — whether in an entertaining way or in an informative manner. And that, right here, is the crux of the matter. Content should be entertaining, or informative. Period. Creating funky little pictures of your products and having great product pitches form part of marketing, sure. But that’s just your sales pitch. Today people expect brands to inform or entertain them through social media. They don’t come here to get a sales pitch — they come to get to know the brand, be informed and be entertained.

Be Transparent

This is old news, but the days of anonymous corporates are long gone. People like brands that communicate their story and share information about the people behind that story.

People like to know what’s happening behind the scenes. They like to get to know the people behind the brand. Human contact is engaging.

Use Your Headlines Wisely

When blogging or looking to have someone notice your social media posts, headlines can be extremely important. On the one hand, they might simply tie into keywords — things people search for online. Then the headline might be less important than using the right keywords. Still, it has to communicate what the blog is about (remember that Google will lower your ranking if people don’t find the content they expect and therefore don’t stay on your site after going there) and be somewhat engaging, but it should be pretty straightforward.

If, on the other hand, you use the headline simply as bait on social media, then make sure it’s an attention grabber.

To compare the two types of headlines, let’s use an example. If you are writing a blog that you hope will be found through Google by marketing experts looking for social media statistics, then a headline such as ‘The Latest Social Media Statistics for Marketers in 2019,’ is great. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to capture people’s attention on social media, you might want to use something like ‘We’ve just gathered some social media statistics for 2019 — the results are truly shocking!’

If you want people to stop and read your posts, or click through, you have to grab their attention. What will grab their attention depends on who they are and why they’re following you in the first place. This is why you need to know your audience.

If you’re using ads, you can do A/B testing, but you can’t exactly do that with the average social media post.

Source: Social Media Today

Conclusion

Engaging content is relevant to your audience, and it should include images, infographics, GIFs and videos as much as possible. It must be delivered using headlines that not only accurately describe the content, but that also provokes interest in the reader.

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