Why do people consume content?
Because they want to learn how to make improvements within their personal life or business or to be entertained.
Engaging content does both.
Unfortunately, a great deal of content flooding the internet and social media is neither educational, nor entertaining.
This is occurring because individuals and organizations understand they need to create content to stand out and generate interest for their products or services but they aren’t investing in publishing content that their target audience enjoys consuming.
This happens for a number of reasons.
- Being cheap
- Not creating content tailored to your audience
- Creating content that is too technical (boring)
As a copywriter, being cheap is the number #1 reason why individuals and businesses that outsource their content creation end up with poor quality content.
They don’t want to pay the price for great content!
You can’t pay for a $500 hooptie and expect it to perform like a Dodge Demon (my favorite car).
The performance of your content is based on the quality you pay for.
If you do choose to create your own content though, you need to focus on your target audience’s pain points instead of force selling your products or services.
Force selling is when you talk about nothing but the benefits of your offering (direct selling), completely forgetting that you’re supposed to be nurturing your audience into customers.
The goal is to educate, which leads to engagement that can be nurtured into new customers.
In order to do this, you need to know how to create engaging content.
If you’re speaking industry jargon that your audience doesn’t understand, you’ll lose their attention very quickly.
The content that does well is created to entice a conversation by being relatable to your target audience.
This may seem like a lot to remember when creating your content but that’s certainly not the case.
Engaging content isn’t difficult to create if you follow the guidelines I have provided in this blog post.
So let’s talk about how engaging content is created.
Create Content that is Relevant to Your Target Audience
Relevant content means that it’s tailored to your target audience.
This is crucial to understand because if relevance isn’t your focus, creating content on a consistent basis and spending tons of money on ads will be futile in producing rewarding content marketing results.
To find out how to create relevant content, you need to know exactly why your target audience needs you and communicate that through your content.
You need to identify their problems, needs, and wants.
Determine how their problems are currently being solved, needs being met, and wants being satisfied.
And then you need to pinpoint the type of content they find irresistible and consume on a regular basis.
Once you have done these steps, you can begin to create relevant content that your target audience will find attractive and eagerly gravitate towards.
In order for your content to be relevant, it needs to focus on educating your audience about a problem they are dealing with or an interest they want to pursue.
The reason this is so important is because it shows that you have a complete understanding of your field expertise (authority content).
Authority content equals $$$ if you can effectively communicate how you can provide the solutions your audience seeks.
This positions you as a potential provider for their needs, instead of just being a supplier of content.
You do want to make money from your content, right?
Money can’t be made if your content isn’t relatable to your audience — motivating them to request more information about how your business can help them specifically.
Invoke an Emotional Response
What are customers?
They’re humans and most human’s actions are influenced by their emotions.
Content marketing is psychology 101.
You must find out what type of content compels your audience to have an emotional response and use it as a tactic within your content strategy.
Don’t confuse this with manipulation.
What you’re doing is creating an advantage that distinguishes your content from all the mediocre content that produces no emotional connection nor provides value.
This is why I said you need to discover the problems that your target audience is dealing with.
These are the pain points your content will focus on which your audience will find appealing because it speaks to the current issue they’re having a problem resolving.
You need to dig deep into their problem and explain why it exist and how it can get worse if not resolved with an absolute solution.
The absolute solution needs to be the product or service that your business provides.
Provide examples of how your product or service has helped others before that dealt with the same problems your audience is currently dealing with.
When you can provide proof of the results you produce, you create eagerness from your audience to experience the same results.
This is because you’ve appealed to their desire to be happy and free of worry.
This same reaction wouldn’t be produced if you didn’t focus on creating an emotional connection.
For example, I can tell you all about the purpose of content marketing but it doesn’t matter to you if you’re not being shown the direct value provided to you from using content marketing.
So I would need to focus on how content marketing can significantly increase your profits, multiply your customer base, and reduce your marketing costs.
Less money being spent to bring more money into your business will definitely entice you to implement content marketing into your marketing strategy.
This is why I want to focus on your desire to grow your business and make more money, rather than providing you with boring facts that you find unappealing.
You’re more concerned about how I can make your business more money instead of how I can improve your content marketing — even though they are both one in the same.
Making more money just sounds more appealing than improved content marketing.
Provide an Action for Your Audience to Follow
Your content is useless if it doesn’t direct your audience towards pursuing a designated action.
Great content becomes engaging content when you encourage your audience to take a step that creates interaction.
This can be a call to share your content on social media, an offer to download your free e-book, or a free 30 minute consultation.
What you’re trying to achieve when doing this is beginning the nurturing process.
You want your audience to become more familiar with you so you can earn their trust and convert them into your customer.
At the end of the day that’s the purpose of creating content — to create new customers.
But you must guide your audience into the customer creation process.
Give them something to do that encourages them to communicate with you via social media or preferably through email.
When you create a conversation, you now possess the ability to understand who they are, what they want to achieve, and you can increase your value in their eyes by further sharing your knowledge.
It’s very hard to do this through your blog unless they’re sharing this information on your comment section.
9 times out of 10, though you’re only going to receive this information by having a private 1 on 1 conversation with an individual.
Therefore, you need to create the invitation that makes this type of communication possible.
You may have people reach out to you on their own if your content is very good or it speaks about a problem they immediately need fixed.
But most people won’t reach out to you unless you encourage them to do so.
This means you need to use as many tactics as possible to start a 1 on 1 conversation, instead of solely depending on a blog post alone to do this.
Remember, you’re creating content to increase your online sales.
Sales don’t occur when you’re unwilling to initiate the process.
Last Words
If you want your content to produce results for you then it needs to be engaging.
Focus on what your audience finds interesting and lead them towards having a conversation with you.
If your blog post isn’t getting likes, comments, or shares then your content isn’t engaging.
Being that this blog is relatively new, you won’t see a lot of likes and shares until I start investing in Facebook ads for my blog post and it gets indexed by Google for content marketing.
But when I post them on LinkedIn, I get likes and comments because my blog topic is something my target audience wants to better understand.
Once I do invest in paid advertising, my blog post will be lead generation assets because they’re relevant, engaging, and include CTAs that encourage deeper interaction.
Your blog post must be doing the same.
If you haven’t already, download Creating Content that Sells.
I’ll also be doing a webinar soon about content marketing and in-person training if your business needs to improve its content marketing performance.
Fill out the form below if you’d be interested in either of these offers or both.