Think about the content consumption process for a moment. Most individuals jump from their phone, to their desktop, to their tablet, to the TV in order to get the information they want. This device hopping makes it difficult for brands to get their audience’s undivided attention.
You may have spent hours slaving over a blog post, but you hit the “publish” button and you hear crickets. A study performed by Kissmetrics revealed that 96% of first-time visitors to your website won’t return. In today’s rapidly moving information-sharing era, getting your visitors’ attention is crucial and one way in which you can guarantee you’ll get that attention is by generating engagement. Engagement promotes familiarity and loyalty and will get those visitors not only coming back, but telling others about your brand.
What is engagement anyway?
Content marketing engagement comes in various shapes and forms. It can be a comment at the end of your blog post, a discussion on a forum regarding your brand or products, participation in surveys and quizzes, or likes and shares on your social media activity.
Preventing your visitors from leaving your content without ever looking back has to be one of the most crucial objectives of a content marketing strategy and here, we will give you some proven ways in which you can get that sought-after stickiness that all brands crave.
- Provide incredible value. Knowing who your audience is and what it is your users want, can help you answer the ultimate question of designing valuable content: WIIFM (what’s in it for me). And by me, I mean them, your users. What is it that they want to see in your content? Answer that and you will be providing content that positively impacts someone else’s life, that provides something useful to others and helps them in one or more ways.
- Ask for opinions. If you want to engage in conversation with your readers, one straight-up way to do it is by asking them questions. This tactic proves to be most effective when done at the end of an article.
- Rewards. Ask your audience to take a certain action and reward them for it. A discount for liking your social media page, a raffle amongst commenters on your post, a giveaway to the first five post shares. People like getting rewarded for their actions and these are all great ideas to get them to engage with your brand and get a boost in your engagement rates.
- Bring them news. Recapping recent changes in an industry or talking about a recent case study are not only powerful ways to drive engagement, but to position yourself as an expert in a topic and a thought leader in an industry.
- Up your visual content. According to research, 46% of internet users believe that a website’s visuals determine a brand’s credibility, so if you are trying to increase your visitor’s engagement in your content, add high-quality visual elements that can help make the website experience eye-catching.
- Add links. Linking to pages on your website or even to other people’s sites for reference can increase the effectiveness of your content by making it more credible, in turn increasing your chances of engagement. When adding links though, make sure you have them open in a separate window.
- Make your material easy to share. Remember what we said about device hopping and fighting over your visitors’ attention? You may only get a few seconds to get them to share, like or comment your blog post or social media posts. You may have caused an impact on your readers, but if you don’t make it easy for them to engage and jump into conversation with your brand, then you’ve wasted a valuable opportunity.