Content is at the core of digital marketing nowadays. A content marketer only has 12 to 15 seconds to grab a user’s attention. And even when he does, only a handful of the users will read the entirety of the article or post. Such a harsh reality for content marketers. The question now is: what a content marketer can do to boost the engagement? The premise is that you need to make your contents more engaging before you can make more engaging content. Here’s how.
1. Focus on Relevance
While relevance is subjective, people tend to mind only when something lacks relevance. Put simply, what is relevant to me may not be relevant to you, but if something is irrelevant, we will all know. Thus, contents should be relevant to the majority if not all of the readers. If the user does not find any pertinence in your contents, it’ll not help him in any way, rendering the content useless.
Before a marketer would know what things or information his audience may deem relevant, the content marketer must know who he is actually targeting. This is the struggle of most content creators because they don’t understand where the readers are coming from, what are their pain points, what their sentiments are, etc. Through this, your contents will be truly targeted to the right audience.
2. Develop a Voice
Practically, this one stems from the first one. No one would like to listen to a brand that has nothing but a fragmented message. Thus, as a content marketer, you need to develop a brand voice first and execute such. Make sure that it will not be diluted even if you have a team of content writers; everyone must be on the same page – with a clear understanding of what the brand is all about, what it cares about, what its values are.
For any content marketer, this can be very tricky. Nonetheless, this can be easily resolved by knowing how you want to project your brand. Would you want your brand to be an authority in your niche? We all do. So, be mindful of your choice of words and the fluency of your sentences. It should be consistent from article to article, for instance.
3. Place Interactive Elements
Although this should be used with caution, interactivity enhance a user's dwell time or the length of time he spent exploring your site or blog. Some websites encourage users to click a button to access more information, giving them a full control on the depth of data they want to explore. Other examples of interactive elements are forms, social media-related actions, quizzes, polls or surveys and even infographics – anything clickable but also adds value to the users.
There are two main points to consider here. Do you want to inform or entertain? Once you know the answer, you can easily find an element that goes best with your purpose. Readers love a good chase only when it is meaningful to them.
4. Put Some Visuals
Choice of visuals may vary from an infographic to a video. In the physical world, a picture paints a thousand words and online, a visual to accompany the text can paint a thousand more words. The keyword here is accompany, which means that the image or video must be relevant to the gist of the contents otherwise, the visual will only be a distraction.
Further, what makes this an even more challenging aspect is the proliferation of information consumption on mobile devices with very limited screen size. Content marketers must use images that are not only relevant to the text, but also helps in understanding the context albeit the small space. This could mean more meticulous image creation or curation on your part.
While it is increasingly difficult to win more readers, what we now know is content engagement is driven by several factors. Nonetheless, the main point is to put your target audience, your readers at the front and center of your content marketing strategy. For one, if you cannot produce relevant contents then you are doing your overall marketing strategy a disservice. Now is the perfect time to rethink your strategy by emphasizing the need for highly-engaging contents.
