Image by Diggity Marketing from Pixabay
By Henry Brown
“Content is king” – the famous words declared by Bill Gates in 1996 – has become an iconic phrase in the world of marketing now. It is very true though – when it comes to marketing, regular, engaging content is going to drive more traffic to your business website and help you rank more highly in search engines.
But what makes engaging content? What can you do to make sure the content that you produce is king? Let’s take a closer look.
What is engaging content?
Engaging is quite a generic, subjective term. What is engaging for one person may be as boring as watching paint dry for the next. The best way to define it is content that produces a quantitative response from people. Using your insights and statistics on your website and social media will give you an idea as to this – content that produces a higher than normal click-through response or converts to sales, or is shared a lot could be described as engaging. Fortunately, with the growth of artificial intelligence, you have a selection of ai copywriting tools to help you develop ideas for engaging content and then take over part of the writing chore for you.
How can you create engaging content?
-Create with intent
While you may be bursting with ideas and eager to share them with your audience, take a step back and wait. Preparation is key, and the more time and effort you spend creating content that is well written, interesting and fulfills the purpose it is created for, the more engaging it is likely to be.
While ‘word-vomit’ – where you just write and publish whatever comes into your head -can sometimes work really well if it is a particularly emotive or personal topic, more often, creating content with intent and purpose is the best way to go about it. Consider how you want your audience to feel after they have read it, consider the actions you want them to take, and how they want to perceive you.
Having clearly defined, actionable goals will improve your content marketing strategy.
–Have fun
Think outside the box a little. Experiments don’t always work, and if you are the sort of brand that doesn’t take themselves too seriously, that can actually pay off – think about Innocent Smoothies and how they use their mistakes to further their branding and marketing.
However, sometimes, an experiment pays off well. Perhaps you could look at purchasing a drone from DrDrone to have fun making aerial videos. This could be ideal if you have a particularly localized audience – everyone loves to see their hometown from a different angle. Written content to support this can be interesting and go viral, particularly on social media.
–Tell a story
Your brand is your story. Tell it wisely.
When you start putting together content, figure out a way of starting off with a story. There are plenty of ways; it is just about finding the right one. It doesn’t have to be worthy of a novel, but it does have to be relevant to the point that you are trying to make with your content, and something that gives a human edge to your concept beyond statistics and analysis.
It also has the benefit of making sure your content is completely unique.
-Encourage user-generated content
This is something that not enough brands take advantage of or use at the moment, but it is slowly starting to gain in popularity.
User-generated content, or UGC, is quite literally content generated by your users, or your audience. One such one that was hugely successful was the Coca-Cola promotion, where names were printed onto labels on bottles of their drink. People all over the world were going mad, trying to find bottles with their names printed on them and posting them to social media. The content and marketing hype was completely generated by the user – and Coca-Cola could sit back and reap the rewards.
The thing that stops businesses from using UGC is that they far too often look at it as a form of advertisement and promotion firstly, and content comes second. While it is amazing advertising, by fighting out compelling UGC, people will want to share and write about it of their own accord, so they do all the hard work for you.
–Consider your passions and strengths
If you aren’t passionate about what it is that you are writing about, you are unlikely to producer engaging and exciting content.
Your audience is only ever going to get as excited about a product or a service or a company as you let them, so let them go wild.
You are the one in control of the story that you are telling, the content that you are putting out there, and the message that you are conveying. You are the one establishing the tone and the general feel of the content. You have to provide them with the experience to make it memorable and engaging, and not just give them words on a page.
–Make sure there is a call to action
Perhaps you have followed all the above points. You have some well thought out and intentional content, you have looked at how you can incorporate user-generated content and you are super passionate about what you are writing about. It’s fun, it’s creative and it’s good.
But no one is doing anything. They are reading and then moving on. They aren’t buying, aren’t clicking through, or aren’t signing up to your email list. Why? What’s wrong with your content?
Read through it again. What are you asking or telling them to do? If you aren’t giving your audience a task or an action, they won’t do it. They are lazy and like to be instructed – instruct them.
Your content is a two-way thing. You provide great content that provides information or entertainment in return for them doing something.
Creating content that hits all of the above is difficult, and sometimes, it will meet some and not others. However, by taking them all into consideration, you will naturally begin to give your audience the content that they want and you need.
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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.
