5 tips for engaging your audience

Are you struggling to create engaging content for your brand regularly? You’re not the first to find it daunting or frustrating. Whether you’re creating content for social media or writing SEO-friendly content for your website, it’s tricky to start without the essential elements.

Planning is paramount when it comes to creating regular content. It’s also important to have a good structure in the form of a skeleton plan before you add meat to the bones.

This guide will provide you with some tips and advice for creating content that will engage and nurture your users.

1. Understand your audience

Before creating content, you need a good understanding of who you want to read it. Identifying the needs of your target audience should be the step no.1 in your strategy. This includes your audience’s demographics, preferences, and behaviour. Information about age, gender, location, and income level, will enable you to create unique content which resonates with your audience’s specific characteristics and interests. Some companies go even further by exploring their user's’ psychographics, such as their values and lifestyle choices. These can provide invaluable information for writing content that connects on an even deeper level.

2. What channels do your customers use?

You should explore which channels your customers typically use, including platforms and the types of content they engage with. Having an accurate awareness of which channels your customers use will be key to choosing the most appropriate ones for your organisation to focus on.

For example, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Linkedin are all forms of social media but certain demographics will have more of a lean towards one or the other. TikTok is typically used by much younger demographics e.g. under 25s, whereas LinkedIn is more for professional networking purposes.

It’s wise to do some research and develop detailed buyer personas for your target audience to gain a clear understanding of their needs and desires.

A quick and easy way to do this is to research your target audience by seeing who your competitors target. It’s likely that your target audiences will overlap. The better you understand your audience, the more effective you’ll become at tailoring content to meet their needs, pain points, and preferences. This will create a sense of trust, loyalty, and engagement, and therefore lay a solid foundation for long-term relationships with your audience.

3. Set clear objectives and KPIs

When you’re confident that you know who your audience is and what platforms they use, it’s worth defining clear goals to clarify your overall objectives. Whether it’s to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate leads, or boost sales; these clear goals will set you on your path to achieving your objectives.

Once you’ve defined your targets, break them down into specific, measurable objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, look at monitoring metrics such as website visitors or social media followers to track your levels of success or failure. If you just want to attract more leads, you could set targets for the number of leads generated, conversion rates, or email sign-ups. Ideally, you want to quantify this as much as possible so you can easily track and measure your content performance.

When setting your objectives, these must be relevant and aligned with your target audience’s needs and preferences, otherwise you could come unstuck. Your content should offer genuine value and resonate with your audience’s interests, pain points, and aspirations. By aligning your objectives with audience-centric content, you increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion, ultimately driving business success.

Along with objectives, consider setting up some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track progress and evaluate success. These will serve as benchmarks that you can measure your performance against, tweaking your strategy as and when required. By regularly monitoring your KPIs and analysing the data, you can identify areas for improvement and optimisation.

At Ascend Marketing, we build every campaign upon a solid foundation: a thorough understanding of your business, your target audience, and your goals. We will help you to maximise your campaign to its full potential. Get in touch today to get started.

4. Write engaging content!

The first three steps should be achievable but now comes the real challenge; writing engaging content that resonates with your target audience.

There are numerous considerations that you should make when writing your content:

1. Storytelling

One of the keys to creating compelling content is storytelling. As humans we respond to narratives, making storytelling a powerful tool for capturing attention and evoking emotions. Whether you’re sharing customer success stories or brand stories, you should try to weave a captivating narrative that not only attracts readers, but keeps them hooked until the end.

2. Authenticity

Authenticity is essential in writing engaging content. Today’s audiences crave authenticity and transparency from brands, so don’t be afraid to show your brand personality in your content. Share your unique perspective, voice, and values authentically, and your audience will respond positively.

3. Relevancy

Every company should aim to stay ahead of the curve by remaining up-to-date on current events, trends, and news within their industry. No customer wants old news, obsolete products, or outdated advice. By staying in tune with the goings on of your industry, you’ll be able to share valuable insights and demonstrate your expertise and knowledge with your audience. This will not only impress but it will create a strong level of brand engagement and trust that will see them coming back for more.

4. Variation

Another aspect of creating compelling content is catering to different learning styles and preferences. A picture tells 1,000 words and a video tells 10,000. Creating attractive visual content will break up information, boosting your content appeal to diverse audiences, and keeping your content fresh and engaging.

5. Simplicity

Writing in clear, concise, jargon-free language will help your content to be easier to read. Nowadays people haven’t got time to go through details to the nth degree so they’ll appreciate information that is straightforward. We recommend you avoid overcomplicating information if it doesn’t need to be.

5. Optimise for search engines

Our final slice of advice for creating engaging content is to optimise it for search engines. You’re writing content which you want people to read, so it’s an essential element for not only your SEO strategy but also your overall digital marketing strategy. You want your content to be discoverable by users who are actively searching for information, products, or services related to your business. Some quick tips include:

1. Keyword research

One of the fundamentals of SEO is keyword research. Keywords are the terms and phrases that users type into search engines when looking for information. By conducting thorough keyword research, you can identify the specific words and phrases that your target audience is using, allowing you to optimise your content accordingly.

2. Content optimisation

Once you’ve identified your keywords, begin to weave them into your content. However, you need to maintain a natural flow to your content; don’t heavily cram your keywords into your content, otherwise, you may fall into the keyword stuffing category. To avoid this, make sure you’re writing for readers first and use keyword variations that are relevant to your content’s topic without overusing the same terms.

3. On-page SEO

In addition to optimising your content, pay attention to on-page elements that contribute to your website’s SEO performance. This includes optimising title tags, meta descriptions, and URL structures. Also, ensure your website is well-structured, with clear navigation and internal linking to help search engines crawl and index your content more effectively.

4. Focus on content quality

Make sure to prioritise creating high-quality, valuable content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. Search engines reward websites that provide relevant, authoritative, and user-friendly content with higher rankings in SERPs. Focus on producing comprehensive, in-depth content that thoroughly covers a topic and offers unique insights or solutions that set you apart from competitors.

5. Track your performance

Lastly, you should regularly monitor and analyse your website’s performance using SEO analytics tools. Track key metrics such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates to identify areas for improvement and optimisation. By continuously refining your SEO strategies, you can maintain and improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results.

If you would like an in-depth analysis of how your website’s SEO is performing, check out our Digital Audit service.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO efforts – look no further than us. We can offer a bespoke campaign tailored to your desired requirements.

Get in touch today!