There’s a lot of time and energy that goes into developing a strong business and knowing your audience. But after you’ve defined who your audience is and developed relevant content, how do you get them to engage with it?
The primary goal here is to create content that’s truly suited to your audience. You’ll understand the target audience’s key problems to be solved and identify how to solve them. You’ll also speak in their language and appeal to their interests.
But there are other ways to tip the scales in your favor. In the pursuit of creating more engaging content for your business, consider these suggestions.
1. Use More Visuals
There are plenty of blogs that don’t use any images. There are others that use boring, poor quality, or irrelevant images. The brain has an easier time processing images than it does text, so visuals are vital for a successful blog.
There are dozens of ways to incorporate more visuals into your content. Here are some of the most effective:
- Video: According to research, users are 95 percent more likely to remember video content when compared to text.
- Infographics: This is a great way to share complex or in-depth information in a way that can be understood within a few minutes.
- In-House Photos: Stock photos have their uses, but photos you take usually perform better. They show the real-life aspects of your business and often resonate more deeply with your audience.
- Memes: For your social campaigns, memes can travel a great distance over social networks and increase awareness of your brand.
This is just a sampling of visuals that work well in your content. Get creative and develop a strategy that includes more visuals.
2. Host a Contest
Contests can be incredibly lucrative, as far as engagement goes, simply because people want free things. Contests garner attention from both your existing followers and will help to generate new leads. As you reward them for their participation, you’ll increase engagement and potentially have a new customer on your hands.
You can create the parameters of your contest, whether it be a raffle-style contest where the winner is selected randomly, or a specific style of participation is rewarded.
Offer a worthwhile prize at the end. Depending on your customer base, it could be tickets to a show or a hand-selected gift hamper. Use discretion when selecting the gift, and let it appeal to your target audience.
3. Write Better Headlines
Headlines are your customers’ first interactions with your content. A boring headline isn’t likely to garner a lot of attention. However, a headline that answers a customers’ concern, entertains in some way, piques curiosity, or otherwise suits your customer base, will appeal to your customers.
Going forward, write headlines that will entice customers to open your content. Consider going through your old content and rewriting headlines for under-performing content.
Just make sure your content delivers. Good headlines promise great content, and if you don’t have it, customers will move on quickly.
4. Gather Email Addresses
Email marketing is very effective for both raising awareness and gaining customer engagement. The best way to gather emails is to build your email list from blog readers. That means they’ve already shown some interest in what you have to offer, and they could benefit most from receiving regular emails.
It’s smart to provide permanent places to gather email addresses on your website, but pop-ups are sometimes more effective. It makes it easy for them to provide their information and for you to contact them.
5. Make an Emotional Connection
Research shows that building emotional connections with your customers is the best way to foster longevity. There are several strategies for accomplishing this with your content, but aside from addressing customers by name, the first is introducing yourself as a real person. When you publish and post content as a real person with a voice, your words will resonate with customers.
You can also use imagery of you and your team to show that they’re dealing with ordinary people like them. Bios for your team members and the authors of your content can also help to normalize your content and make it more approachable.
Gaining engagement can be a long process, but it’s vital for coming closer to your customers and generating loyalty. Try different strategies, and take note of what works best. With time, you’ll have built a fool-proof strategy for gaining and maintaining engagement.
