This is important because you’ll need to empathize with your audience if you’re going to create content they’ll engage with. Would I take the time to comment on this? Spend as much time on headlines as on creating your content Headlines matter. Here are just a few that work well for generating audience engagement: Make your audience laugh. Do you respond when your audience engages with your content? Engagement from your brand breeds further engagement from your audience. If you want to engage your audience, you need to be where your audience is. Don’t feel that your content has to be limited to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. That isn’t much to ask of your content, is it? A social media enthusiast, she is well-versed in content marketing and other internet marketing niches.
Engagement is gold. When your customers comment, like, or share your content, they’re telling you that your brand is providing value in a sea of white noise.
Earning customer engagement isn’t easy, though. It takes creativity, consistency, and a unified effort from everyone in your marketing team. At times, it can be downright exhausting.
Although striving to create engaging content is very demanding and challenging, those who do it right find that it’s worth it. Whether your content is in the form of pictures, infographics, videos, songs, blog posts or ebooks, here are seven important factors for generating engagement.
1. Know your audience by developing buyer personas
A customer persona is a fictional (yet research-based) representation of the customer you’re trying to engage with. For instance, Jeff here would buy a GoPro from your site but you would have a hard time selling it to Jack unless it brings some business benefits.
With carefully-researched buyer personas, you can visualize your ideal audience and relate to them as human beings. Relating to your customers as real people is very important.
Important elements to buyer personas include things like:
- Where your buyer persona lives
- Their age and gender
- Education level, job title and income
- Interests
- Relationship status
- Buying motivations
You can’t engage with people you don’t know. If you haven’t spent much time developing effective buyer personas, the time is now!
2. Genuinely care about your audience
Once you begin to really know your audience through buyer personas, it’s time to ask yourself: Do I really care about my audience? This is important because you’ll need to empathize with your audience if you’re going to create content they’ll engage with.
When your team gathers to create a video, blog post, infographic, etc., don’t begin by asking, “How can we generate engagement for our brand?” Instead, ask customer-centered questions such as:
- What problems can our content solve for our audience?
- What will help our audience get more value from our products or services?
- What can we produce that will brighten our reader’s day, encourage them, or inspire them?
- If I saw this content online, would I find it interesting enough to stop in my tracks and read it?
- Would I take the time to comment on this? Would I give it a like on Facebook? Would I share it on Twitter?
Approach content creation with your audience in mind first, and your brand second. If you genuinely care about your customers, they will genuinely care about your brand.
A 2011 report in Truth Central about millennials showed the ‘then’ young to have a strong sense of justice, but today’s youth is extremely vague and distracted, thanks to the onslaught of social media channels and information overload.
This makes it all the more important for your brand to cut through the clutter and gain their attention with good content.
3. Really grab attention
In the marketing industry, pretty much everybody talks about the importance of “grabbing attention.” But how many marketers really command the laughs, tears, or inspiration needed to earn people’s valuable attention?
The marketers of Squatty Potty pulled it off alarmingly well. Using unconventional humor for an otherwise boring product – toilet stools – they earned over 27,000,000 YouTube views and over 5,700 comments. (Who wouldn’t do an eyebrow-raising double take at a video titled “This Unicorn Changed the Way I Poop”?)
At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum is a heartwarming YouTube video from Thai Life Insurance. Because it grabbed and held the attention of people all over the world, it has earned more than 28,000,000 views…
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