7 Ways to Improve Content Engagement

If you want to improve your content management strategy, you need to understand your target audience’s needs and interests then deliver your message through email or social media. Building a content framework on your audience’s understanding will help you deliver a great user experience and maximize your traffic and conversions.

Source: Seed to Scale

Aside from being relevant and engaging, your content should also be appropriate to the customer’s location in the customer journey. If the potential customer is still in the stage where they’re still trying to educate themselves about their needs or possible solutions, sending them discount offers right away would do more harm than good for your brand.

A good content management strategy will consider the audience’s needs and create content that addresses those needs and provides actionable insight. Let’s look at some ways to improve your website’s content management strategy.

1. Identify your target audience

Before creating an editorial calendar for your content, you need to know your audience and discover their needs. A mismatch between the needs of your target audience and your content marketing will yield poor conversions. On the other hand, sending appropriate content to the right audience will improve your engagement and result in higher conversion rates.

You may start this process by creating a customer persona of your ideal customer, their needs, their purchase drivers and their pain points. This visual representation of your customers helps you understand their needs and create relevant content.

Your customer persona will also include your target customer’s location, occupation and industry. Using the customer persona, you can search LinkedIn for individuals that match that description then use email finder tools to get their contact details. Doing this is particularly useful if you’re a B2B marketer looking for quality leads.

2. Grab attention with headlines

A headline is the first thing that your readers see when they open your content. If you grab your audience’s attention with a catchy headline, they become curious about the article and read it straight through, driving up engagement.

According to Search Engine Journal, 80% of readers never make it past a headline to the main content. If your headlines aren’t catchy enough, your audience will probably skip your content, no matter how informative or well-written it is.

You can follow the 4 U’s rules when crafting attention-catching headlines:

• Make it unique: Your headlines should stand out in a sea of other headlines.
• Be ultra-specific: Your headlines should address a specific need or target a specific audience. One-size-fits-all solutions rarely work in marketing.
• Convey a sense of urgency: Your headlines should make your audience want to read your content now. Otherwise, they aren’t going to convince your audience to read your content tomorrow.
• Ensure it is useful: Your headlines should give the reader a clear idea of what to expect from the content.

When you develop the ability to catch your audience’s attention with your headlines, you’ve won half the battle.

3. Create interactive content

When it comes to initiating engagement, interactive content is unmatched. Encouraging your audience to interact with your content in the form of surveys, quizzes, polls and infographics can increase engagement and customer loyalty, especially if the content is based on a topic that hits close to home.

You don’t have to replace your existing content to make it interactive. Repurposing your existing content to make it interactive is simpler than you think. For example, you can repost your content on Quora as a reply to a user question. Because Quora is populated by people who have opinions on almost everything, you won’t have to wait long for people to reply to your post.

4. Use videos

Video is an excellent type of content to boost engagement. According to a study conducted by Attivio, people spent up to two minutes more on pages with videos compared to pages with just static media. People spend 100% more time on pages with videos than on pages with static media. However, most businesses don’t publish video content as often as they should:

Source: Backlinko

When you post an article, people usually read the headline and briefly scan the content. Including a video along with your text content boosts audience engagement. Making an engaging video is challenging but worth the investment as it attracts 300% more inbound links than blogs with only text.

Here are the ways to make an engaging video:

• Keep it short.
• Give out vital information at the start as the audience’s attention span declines as it progresses.
• Add a solid call to action (CTA) at its end, as viewers should know what to do next.

If you’re posting your videos on YouTube in addition to your website, make sure you track engagement metrics on YouTube Analytics. You may also add videos to your marketing emails to boost click-through rates. LinkedIn Learning is a good example of a business that uses videos in marketing emails effectively:

When you combine catchy videos with interesting copy and compelling call-to-action (CTA) buttons, you invite users to click through and know more about the topic.

5. Respond to comments quickly

When you disable comments in your blog or social media posts, you deprive yourself of an opportunity to engage with your audience. Responding to comments fast helps your business build a reputation as a responsive company that listens to its customers.

If the overall sentiment to your posts is negative, you can’t afford to wall yourself off from the public. Doing so is arguably worse than responding to negative posts because it sends a message that you’re unwilling to listen or take feedback.

Remember, the opposite of love isn’t hate but apathy. If someone takes time to leave a comment on your page, it means they have engaged enough with your business for them to have an opinion on your content. The least you can do is acknowledge their concern then send them a private message to discuss it in detail.

6. Include personal examples

While accurate data helps you build credibility, personal examples make the data more relatable to your audience. Without personal examples, your data is just a series of cold figures that matter little to your audience. Adding your own experiences to your content marketing will allow people to see how the data and what it represents affect others like them.

You should also be ready to tell your audience about a time when you encountered a problem, and your product helped solve it. This gives everyone a better idea of how your product works and what effects it has on you and other potential customers. When we say your content should provide actionable advice, we mean that you must emphasize that the problem you’re discussing can be solved -- and that your expertise is the best solution for it.

7. Pay attention to the time and frequency

Though every social media channel has its own "peak time" of the day to post content to increase reach, that doesn't mean your target audience follows that timing. If you have audience data, check the times they tend to be the most active and then post content accordingly. You may use social media scheduling tools to ensure that your content gets posted at the times you’ve identified as your audience’s peak hours.

Aside from posting content to your social media accounts, you may also promote your content to your email list, or create a list of influencers to promote the content to. You can use an email outreach tool to send new content when they are more likely to check their mail. It’s good practice to set up a follow up email sequence to maximize the chance of getting a response.

In closing

To build a robust inbound marketing strategy, you need to craft engaging content. When you create highly engaging content, you drive more leads, get more customers and earn more revenue.

You need to be strategic when you create content. Your strategy should begin with understanding your target audience and creating a customer persona. This will determine your content topics and the way you present that information.

Once you’ve created your content, you need to write catchy headlines to attract audience attention. You may also create interactive content such as infographics and quizzes or use videos to deliver your message more effectively. Using personal examples in your content will make your ideas more relatable.

Finally, content engagement doesn’t stop at creating engaging content. You also need to engage with your audience. Responding to comments, whether they’re positive or negative, will send a message to your audience that you care about their opinion, while posting at the right time and day of the week will expose your content to a wider audience.

Content engagement doesn't surge overnight. You have to be patient to see the desired results. When you create enriching content and implement powerful marketing strategies, your audience engagement level will keep going up.