When you start out a business, your first priority becomes advertising it as much as possible. In the past, this was done with the help of flyers and billboard commercials. Today, these mediums of advertisement are no longer that effective due to the fact that they are somewhat overshadowed by newer methods. Digitizing your marketing efforts is the best option for you to promote your business.
What is Engaging Digital Marketing Content?
Engaging content is, as the name indicates, content that engages readers. But that is not a very helpful definition.
Content engagement can be gauged in different ways and methods. For one, content can be said to be engaging if it:
- Retains the attention of the readers that come across it
- Provides value that makes it more likely to attract a newer and larger readership
- Follows best practices such as the inclusion of visuals, statistics and the like
That is the introduction of “engaging content”. Now, let’s put two and two together to define engaging digital marketing content.
Engaging digital marketing content is the content that consists of the aforementioned qualities and is used via digital marketing avenues such as blogs, website texts, emails and the like.
If we wanted to define engaging content in the context of each of these channels, we could say that:
- Engaging blogging content is that which provides useful and somewhat uncharted information to the readers
- Engaging email content is that which prompts the reader to take action such as clicking a button or opening a link
- Engaging website content is that which induces the reader/visitor to explore the site and navigate their way to someplace favorable, such as the contact page or the sales page, etc.
The type of content explained above might be difficult to create but we have prepared a list of steps that you can follow to do so. It covers a few comprehensive methods that will cover all types of content, be it blogs, mails, product pages, or website content.
- Research Your Audience and Understand Their Needs
In order to create quality content, you need to be aware of the interests of your target audience. So, your first step should be to research your audience. Monitor their behaviors on and off your website. Understand the user demographics, such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographical location
Factors like these can help you in determining the dos and don’ts while writing your content.
Additionally, a rookie mistake among new content writers is that they try to make content that only pleases the search engine and, in the pursuit of doing so, they deprive their work of relevancy. This is a huge mistake because once the search engine recognizes that your content is irrelevant to the queries entered by users, it (the search engine) will take measures to ensure your content does not appear in search results.
To avoid this issue, you have to understand the topic and then create a piece of content that is relevant to that topic, fulfills the needs of your user, and is also well-optimized for SEO so that it can reach an audience that is actually interested in exploring your work.
- Use Headers and Sub-headers to Organize Content
Your content should consist of a relevant and eye-catching headline and distinct sub-headings explaining different segments related to your topic. For users that are interested in only a small portion of your content, this will be of great help.
Similarly, there will be users for whom it is not feasible to read the whole content due to any type of circumstances. They might only want to go through the main points of your work to get a vague idea of the message that you are trying to convey.
For this reason, your headings and subheadings should be relevant and provide as much information as possible. In addition, it is advised to make a list of these headings before writing your content to keep things tidy instead of coming up with different disorganized ones while the process of writing.
In addition to increased user engagement, these headings are helpful in boosting SEO performance as well. A headline is the main source through which a search engine recognizes the constituents of your work. Therefore, these headings should be crafted in a very careful way so that it facilitates both your audience and the search engine.
- Stay Relevant to The Topic
When users reach your content, they expect to get what they are looking for. So, for instance, if the title of your article is ‘fastest sports cars,’ then you should write only about those cars and not about motorcycles because the audience is not interested in motorcycles.
If you deviate too much from your topic, then the users will skip your content and find something more relevant to what they are looking for.
Furthermore, it is equally important that you provide information that is valuable and informative. Ordinary writing is not appreciated because users expect to get new and updated information that increases their knowledge.
So, you should put effort into making content that is informative and relevant to your topic. For example, you can cite trusted sources containing statistics that are related to what you are writing to support your claims.
- Make Sure Your Content is Readable
Employing writing strategies that make your content easy to read is a fundamental step toward creating engaging content. Users should be able to understand what they are reading. If they feel that consuming your content is proving beneficial to them, they will continue reading and interacting with your content.
On the other hand, if you have used phrases that are constructed in such a way that they are close to being unreadable, then most of the users will not continue reading. You have to make content that provides maximum comfort to the user.
You can make such readable content by,
- Following grammar rules
- Using proper punctuation
- Accurately using tenses
- Utilizing appropriate vocabulary
Taking so many rules into consideration might not be possible for everyone. An alternate approach could be the use of the paraphrase tool available online.
These tools improve the readability of your work by using easier words and simplifying sentence structures. Many such tools are present on the internet to assist content writers.
These tools take a piece of text and process it. After that, they reword it using different terms and phrases.
Among other tools, Rephrase provides such paraphrasing services. This is how a sentence with poor readability was paraphrased by it.
As you can see in the image above, the paraphraser has simplified some of the instances in the content. For example, it replaced the words “never intended” to “weren’t meant”. It also changed “part of the reason” to “one of the reasons”. Both changes lend a hand to making the content easier to read.
- Use Images and Infographics
Images are proven to be more effective in terms of trying to explain something as compared to huge pieces of plain text. According to the results of an online study, it is estimated that about 91% of consumers prefer visual content over text.
Hence, incorporating images in your content is a great way to improve user engagement. It could be said that one image is worth a thousand words. Using relevant images in your content will facilitate your users by providing them with an overview of your writing with the help of a few visuals and thus saving them time.
Rephrase.info
The boxed icons in the above image are an example of the practical use of infographics.
Plain images are not the only source of visual content marketing. Nowadays, the use of mediums such as video, animations, and infographics has also become very common. These have totally changed the preferences of people around the world. Many people would prefer to watch a 2 -minute video as compared to a thousand-word article that requires about 15-20 minutes of reading time.
So, it is suggested that even if your content is mostly in written form, you should use different types of visuals to make it look more appealing and let users engage with your work more.
- Stay Original
Creating unique content is a crucial factor that decides the success of your work. If a search engine gets even a hint that your work is copied from another online source, it will flag you and will not be shown on search result pages.
Perform proper research from multiple sources to get maximum knowledge regarding the topic of your work. But be careful not to exactly copy someone’s work and make it a part of your own because this comes under the definition of plagiarism.
Plagiarism is shown in your content when it matches already published works on the internet. It is extremely harmful to your content as search engines highly discourage such content.
To be sure that you haven’t accidentally included unoriginal content, you can check for plagiarism with the help of online tools. This is how these plagiarism checkers show results when a piece of content is entered into them.
We entered the content from this article and checked for plagiarism with the help of an online tool.
We used Check-Plagiarism for this demonstration since it is a popular and accurate plagiarism-detecting tool that you can find online.
These tools scan the entire web to check whether your content matches with another source or not. After that, it gives you a percentage of plagiarism that is in your content. If it is too high, you should evaluate the sentences with issues and change them or remove them altogether.
Conclusion
Optimizing your content to fit the needs and requirements of your users is the essence of all the strategies for making content that effectively engages with your audience. The different steps to include in this strategy are explained above.