The digital marketing environment is very competitive. Every business and marketer is trying to grab people’s attention. Unfortunately, people’s busy lifestyles and short attention spans make it harder for them to engage their audiences effectively.
We can see the importance of good-quality, relevant, and engaging content at this point. Content marketing is beneficial for improving audience engagement if you know the right techniques.
9 Tips to Improve Audience Engagement
Here are some ways to use content marketing to drive audience engagement.
1. Write Catchy Headlines
The first thing people notice in any form of content is the title or the headline. More often than not, people decide whether to read further or not based solely on the headline.
Therefore, it is important to write headlines immediately to grab the audience’s attention and encourage them to read further.
Here are some expert tips on how to create compelling headlines:
- Using numbers in headlines is a tried-and-tested way of grabbing attention and building the audience’s trust in your content.
- You can also write a shocking or controversial statement to grab attention.
- Highlighting a challenge or asking a question your audience can relate to is also quite useful.
- Make your headlines short, crisp, yet informative.
BuzzFeed, for example, uses these tactics for practically all of its headlines.
Image via BuzzFeed
Overall, your headlines should be relevant to the topic and evoke the audience’s interest. You can also use one of the headline analyzer tools, like the one provided by CoSchedule, to optimize your headlines further.
2. Add Calls-to-Action in Your Content
The best way to engage your audience is to encourage them to act further after viewing your content. It could be as simple as asking them to follow you or comment on your post. It could also encourage them to visit your website, fill out a form, or even make a purchase.
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are what make this happen. Therefore, you need to add CTAs to your content to encourage your audience to take further action.
CTAs do not necessarily need to be in the form of big glaring buttons like those on a website. Even with social media content or any other, you can add a CTA by simply asking people to do something.
When you post a video, add a link to the description. When you write a social media post, ask people to visit your website by clicking on your bio link. Basically, encourage people to interact further with your brand and content.
3. Leverage Technology to Optimize Your Content
If you’re unsure what your audience likes and engages with the most, you can always get help. Content optimization tools like Cortex can help you create engaging content. It provides data and insights into what your audience is most likely to engage with.
You can use such tools to optimize your content and get higher engagement from your audience.
4. Interact With Your Audience
Another great way to improve audience engagement is actually to interact with your audience. Content marketing is not just limited to creating and sharing content but can and should be extended to conversations with your audience.
It could be by answering questions in the comments section, sharing other useful resources, or simply entering a discussion on a topic.
It helps you engage with your audience more directly and encourages further comments, questions, and answers. In addition, you can leverage social media listening tools to keep track of your mentions and reply to relevant comments and questions.
You can also join online communities like Quora and answer questions to demonstrate your expertise and build a following. Again, remember to engage in conversations in the comments section to drive further engagement in your content.
5. Use Quizzes, Polls, and Other Interactive Content
Certain content formats drive more engagement than others. Quizzes and polls are proven ways of driving audience engagement on social media and websites.
You can create the most informative blog post and still not get as much engagement as a simple quiz or poll. However, this type of content generates curiosity in the viewers to find out the answer or know what the majority thinks.
Quizzes or questions work simply because people want to see whether they know the right answer.
Polls work because most people are inherently curious and looking for validation. That is why people almost always take a poll to find out how others voted and whether their opinion matches public opinion.
So, if you want to use content quickly to increase audience engagement, try these content formats.
Here’s an example:
6. Tell a Story
Stories are more memorable and engaging than most types of content and should be a key part of your content marketing strategy.
This entails weaving a story around the information you want to convey to make it more interesting for your audience. For example, you can tell a story about your brand’s history or what it stands for. Likewise, you can showcase your achievements or annual initiatives by combining them in a story. It will improve audience engagement.
Stories are also quite successful in advertisements. For example, check out this Christmas commercial by Apple, which received over 23.6 million views within two weeks of its release.
Image via YouTube
7. Use Humor
Many brands use humor in their content to engage their audiences and get more likes, comments, and views. As a result, humorous content like memes, comic strips, puns, etc., is quite popular on social media.
We can add humor to any content format for any content platform; therefore, it is easy to incorporate into any content strategy.
If you want to take this strategy to the next level, add some cute animals to the mix, and you’ll surely get more likes.
Here’s an example of an Instagram account that uses a mix of humor and cute animal pictures and videos to drive engagement.
Image via Instagram
8. Create Video Content
Videos are the most engaging of all types of content because they are visual and dynamic. They are also quite versatile, as you can create numerous types of videos depending on what your audience likes.
You can do a lot with videos, from creating video tutorials to showing interactive customer testimonials. And, as people can actually see things happening in action, it is much easier to understand a concept via video than via text.
So, create useful, engaging, and visually appealing to grab your audience’s attention and drive engagement immediately.
You can go through our guide on how to create a YouTube channel.
9. Provide Value to Your Audience
We have discussed many different content marketing techniques for increasing audience engagement. However, one thing that remains common is that your content needs to be useful to your audience.
What matters most is the value that you provide your audience through your content. Of course, you can use different tactics to grab attention, but people will follow you and consume more of your content if there’s something in it for them.
So, before creating content, do customer research and understand what your target audience is interested in. Your content should aim to inform, solve a problem, inspire, or entertain your audience.
Conclusion
These are some of the most effective content marketing techniques that can help you get more audience engagement. Use these and see your brand’s audience engagement grow.
Have any more content marketing techniques that have worked for your business? Please share your tips and insights in the comments section.