Every piece of content in your inbound marketing should elicit a response from your audience; either a like, share or click. It’s not enough to simply publish content and hope it creates engagement. You must intentionally share articles and posts that are likely to compel and entice users to interact.
That’s the essence of your marketing strategy. You want to show social proof and credibility (likes), increase exposure and visibility (shares), and drive traffic to your website and landing pages (clicks).
During your content creation, it’s important to keep these objectives in mind so your marketing is effective and aligns with your ultimate business goals.
So, we’ve compiled 4 unique ways on how to create content that people like, share and click to enhance your content strategy and boost audience engagement.
#1 Focus on an Exceptional Title
Your title gives the first impression of your content. It determines whether people will engage…or not. Your title has a huge impact on your traffic, shares and search results. Therefore, investing time in crafting the best, most attractive headline is time well spent since it plays a key role in creating favorable results.
Here’s how to focus on creating an exceptional title that gets noticed and encourages users to engage:
- Optimize your title for SEO by including a longtail keyword your audience is actively searching for
- Include emotional and descriptive words such as empower, energize, amazing, and free to make your title colorful and lively
- Listicles (numbered articles) perform extremely well on social because readers know exactly what to expect
- Questions and how-to’s also make for great headlines to encourage engagement
- Make sure your title is concise, between 6-9 words
- Headlines that either show positive or negative sentiment also perform well
- Consider using CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to create stellar headlines that work for your audience
#2 Leverage Interactive Content
Interactive content is the future of content marketing. With more brands publishing content at alarming rates, it’s vital to give yours the slight edge above the competition. Adding interactive content to your strategy helps better educate your audience since it requires active engagement on their part.
You see, content pieces like quizzes, polls and surveys, calculators, videos, games and interactive infographics offer different ways for people to digest your message. As they click on, scroll through, or input text, users are more likely to remember their experience. Additionally, interactive content typically yields a personalized result that is tailor-made for the participant.
Commit to adding more of these content types in your marketing. Quizzes tend to do well on Facebook, igniting shares and clicks.
Surveys are great for engaging your email list to learn more about their preferences and needs. Calculators are neat additions to web content to help people obtain a specific numeric result. Finally, videos have a unique way of keeping visitors on your content longer to improve SEO ranking.
Use interactive content to your ultimate advantage.
#3 Appeal to Emotion
Content that stimulates an emotional response certainly drives people to like, click and share. Tapping into the emotions of your readers should be an active ingredient in your content marketing because it draws users into your message. Whether you provoke a laugh, smile, or tear, everyone can relate to these emotions, thus prompting more followers to engage.
Depending on the goal of your content, there are two approaches to appealing to emotion to get people interacting with your post. If your aim is to increase brand awareness, hone relationships and share valuable content, then you’ll want to use emotion that prompts readers to share your content.
Typically messages that offer humor, positivity (quotes and inspirational messages), elicits shock and awe (facts or data), and even anger work well for this objective.
Now, if your goal is to move your visitor further down the buyer’s journey towards the sale, the key is using sales psychology that prompts people to action. Pinpointing their pains and problems and showing how they can overcome the through your product or service is an effective way to using emotion to encourage clicks and sales.
#4 Make Your Content Super Relevant and Useful
We can agree that quality-rich content is key for sharing helpful information with your audience. As mentioned, more brands are embracing content marketing to connect with today’s digital consumer. Since 81% of shoppers search content before making big purchases, publishing valuable content is a no-brainer to attracting new visitors and customers to your brand.
With that prefaced, it’s important that your content resonates with your audience to be effective. By having a clear understanding of your market, their interests, wants and desires, you can tailor your content strategy to cater to their needs.
Your goal in your content strategy is to speak directly to the hearts of your ideal customer.
Use the following tips to ensure your content stays relevant and fresh for your audience:
- Quality trumps quantity. Focus on publishing value-rich content that educates, informs, or delves deep into solving a common problem in your industry
- Long-form content performs well on search engines and social media. In fact, the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words (Source: Backlinko). Aim for longer posts to increase visibility and offer more insight to your reader
- Use tools like surveys and polls to discover what your audience desires to see more of. Reach out to your biggest fans, your email list, to see how you can help improve their experience through your content
- Teach people ways to achieve a specific result or goal through how-to content. You’ll bolster your thought-leadership and be viewed as a reliable source
- Curate content from authoritative sources to constantly feed your audience with information they can use or find valuable
Conclusion
Your ultimate goal of your content marketing should be to drive favorable behaviors that encourage people to like, click and share your content.
The more interaction you receive from your posts, the more it fosters engagement, traffic, lead generation and sales. Implement these tips to amplify your content marketing results.
Finally, always end with a call-to-action that tells your reader what to do next!
Are you struggling with creating content that gets in front of your audience, drives traffic to your website and generates leads? We’re equipped to help you reach your next level in your inbound marketing strategy. Reach out to us here and let’s chat!
