If you want to give your website the best opportunity to do well online, it all starts with content. People are constantly looking to consume information that will improve the quality of their lifestyle. Creating content that delivers this value is the key to creating ongoing traffic and engagement. Brett Montgomery of Soul Digital published an article detailing “How to engage digital audiences through content”. Below we provide tips that you can use to successfully develop content that will engage and captivate your audience.
Write for a targeted audience.
The success of your content will be determined by the audience that you are developing the content for. Rather than develop a generic piece of content, aim to identify a micro-niche audience that you can develop the content for. These people will be more passionate and compelled to engage with the content that you develop. When identifying the audience, look into a group and the topics or interests that the group is interested in. When researching the topics of that audience, look for sub-categories of people that are within that audience. A simple method you can use is to research web forums and to review their discussion boards. Look at the amount of responses and threads that the topics have. This will give you a good indication of how popular the topic is and the probability of success you will have should you target the content towards that audience.
Communicate your voice
When you communicate, you are communicating the voice of the brand. This may be your voice as an author or as a business ambassador. The way you say it is just as important as the facts that you will have in your content. Understand the interests of the audience and communicate that to them clearly. For example, if you are providing a tutorial on make-up, don’t try to focus on being funny like a comedian. While you can implement elements of humour, it shouldn’t detract from the main point that you are trying to get across.
Tell a story
The most important factor is to be able to tell a story to your audience that will keep them engaged and that will compel them to take action, whether that is in the form of commentary, liking or sharing the content. Telling a story that is engaging is one part, but communicating the facts through the story is what will add depth to the content that you are producing. To communicate an effective story, you will need to develop a story angle. Some popular angles include:
- Human interest
- Trending topics
- Topic commentary (also providing a point of view)
- Information release
- Educational (Such as a tutorial)
Speak their language
Once you know your audience, you need to know how to communicate to them clearly. Use words that they understand and avoid using jargon. For example, if you are developing a brand-marketing piece, you can use marketing buzzwords and acronyms such as “Remarketing & DSP services that will boost your brand awareness”. However, if you are speaking to Joe the plumber down the road, you would need to word it in his language such as ‘By using remarketing services, you can get more customers by targeting those people that have shown an interest in your services.”
Add credibility to your piece with researched facts.
The quality of the content that you will be producing will come down to the facts that are presented. Add credibility to your piece by conducting interviews and using quotes. You can also use link citations for other web resources that are valuable and add to your content. Also adding slideshares and HTML embeds from other websites such as images, infographics and videos can help to improve the perceived value of the content for your audience.
With these tips, you should be able to develop content that is of a high quality and that will entice your viewers to engage and discuss your content.
Article Submitted By Community writer
