In some circles, highly engaging content is the Holy Grail of content marketing. And why wouldn’t it be? Creating and sharing content that your audience actually wants, that they talk about, that they share, that helps them in their job, that inspires, that guides, that converts, and ultimately leads to sales. It’s what every marketing team aspires to achieve, yet, is sometimes never realized.
Whether you’ve identified this as a problem or not, it’s critical to address this now. Over the years, we’ve identified several factors that can result in content that simply doesn’t engage well with audiences. For the purposes of this blog, we’ve distilled this knowledge into three key areas or reasons why your content might not be engaging with your audience. But don’t worry, we offer some helpful tips to help you improve in this area.
1. Your Content Doesn’t Resonate With Your Audience
If your content isn’t resonating with your target audience, this factor alone presents a significant barrier to engagement. Content that fails to address certain needs of your audience at any stage of the buyer journey, or relies on inaccurate personas, old ideas, stale, or outdated data, are a few reasons your content might not resonate with its intended audience.
But don’t despair, there’s a few tweaks you can make to your content, designed to bolster engagement. Aside from ensuring content corresponds to the stage of the buyer journey your audience is at, ensure you have an accurate understanding of your buyer personas and that your content is actual useful. Content that is educational, informative, current, and relevant is a good start, but ensure you’re injecting new ideas in your content too. Leveraging original data can also move your audience closer to deepening engagement. Vinay Koshy, in his post on Search Engine Journal, offers many other helpful tips for boosting engagement, such as making your content actionable, being concise, creating compelling headlines, creating intriguing introductions, leveraging visuals, and citing experts. Brian Clark’s article on copyblogger, offers some additional tips such as being unpredictable, keeping things simple, ensuring your content remains authentic, and keeping your content credible.
2. Your Content Isn’t Interactive
I touched on this briefly in the preceding section, but your content needs to be packaged and presented in the right way if your goal is to boost engagement. Content that is not interactive will often fail to engage your audience, no matter how good it is. For some of us “seasoned” marketers, it’s sometimes easy to think that pushing truly amazing (written) content to your audience will deliver the intended action such as opening an email or responding to an offer or other call to action. It was a successful approach in the past, but today, it’s really a two-way street, so more imagination and creativity will be required to standout out and encourage engagement.
An easy and fun way to do this, is to make your content interactive. Quizzes, surveys, interactive infographics or galleries, online assessments, video, live video, toolkits, and polls are few content assets you should consider in your content marketing initiatives in an effort to boost engagement. Leveraging interactive content as part of your content marketing mix is a more stimulating experience for your audience and has been proven to boost engagement. According to Content Marketing Institute, 46% of marketers use interactive content to boost engagement. Also, making your content easily shareable over social media or other channels is a great way to boost engagement.
3. You Aren’t Connecting With Your Audience
Having great, interactive content by leveraging the above tips, will go a long way in helping to boost engagement. But sometimes, it’s not just the content alone that needs your attention. By connecting with your audience in a more direct and predictable way, you can take engagement one step further. This shows you care about your audience and are open to hearing their thoughts on any given subject. What might this look like? For blog posts, it might mean enabling the commenting option and responding to each and every comment, or posing questions to your audience. For social media, it’s responding to inquiries or asking questions of your audience, social listening, and weighing in on relevant conversations.
I even think publishing schedules fall into this category as well. Establishing a predictable, and consistent stream of helpful and interactive content assets published by your organization does wonders to establish a deeper connection with your audience. It builds mindshare with your audience and helps to establish your organization as a thought leader in its space. This can be executed through your email marketing campaigns, newsletters, lead nurtures, social media posting schedules, blogs, and other more targeted content distribution techniques.
Content engagement is a critical component in any content marketing initiative. Ensuring you produce quality content that resonates with your audience, keeping your content highly interactive, and maintaining open dialogue while maintaining a deep connection with your audience are sure ways to boost engagement.
Learn more about how to create engaging content by connecting with one of our Content Strategists today.
