The competition for your audience’s attention is fierce. From advertisements to social media comments to blog posts, we are bombarded with a variety of content every day. In fact, more than three million blog posts and 380 million tweets are published daily.

When coming up with content ideas, consider your strategy, the goals and what you want your audience to do when they interact on your site. What are you hoping to accomplish? Do you want to build brand awareness and thought leadership or generate more leads?

Avoid publishing content without having a content plan in place and considering your businesses goals.

For your content to be appealing to your audience, it must speak to their specific needs and problems. For example, if you are a finance blog targeting millennials, an article about retirement is likely not to interest them quite yet. When your audience sees value in your content, they will continue to relate with your brand.

Engaging content helps increase brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, strengthen relationships with your customers and build search engine optimization (SEO). How do you create engaging content?

The following strategies can help you create content to connect with and engage your audience.

Respond to Your Fans

Interacting with your followers on social media can help you learn the needs of your target audience and what problems they face. Find out what social media channels your target audience uses and pay attention to their activity.

When you see a positive comment, make sure to like it and even comment back so your followers can see you are paying attention and active on the account. Pay attention to trends and patterns in the Comments section of your social pages. For example, if you are in Cosmetics and Beauty, and see comments inquiring about SPF in products during summer months, consider writing a post specifically about why and how to use sunscreen in your make-up routine and post it before a heatwave.

Social media comments, likes and shares are ways for your audience to express what they like and don’t like, what they want to see more of, what excites them, etc. Use online tools to monitor mentions of your brand online so you don’t miss any opportunities to engage with your audience. Some helpful tools that can help you do this are Brandwatch and Mention. Once you understand your customers problems and concerns, you can create content to demonstrate the ability of the business to support its customers.

Understand Website Metrics

Use your website metrics to find out what’s popular with your audience and what pages are getting the most clicks. Where are your sales coming from? Is there a certain product getting more traffic than others? Was there a recent update that people are excited about? There are many website monitoring tools such as Google Analytics or SEMrush to help you create content based on what is already attracting your audience to further captivate them.  

Use Keywords to Create Content

Keywords are important to your SEO efforts, but they can also help you create engaging content to attract your audience. Keywords reveal what content the audience is searching for, commenting on and sharing. Understanding how Google ranks websites for certain types of keywords enables you to identify other relevant keywords that may be beneficial to add into your writing to further build authority.

Once you identify these keywords, have them serve as inspiration for future content topics. Introducing keywords in some content headlines and sub-headers will assist your audience in finding the content. 

Make sure to include appropriate keywords within the content – but don’t overdo it. This means, align your keywords with your business goal, but don’t try stuffing keywords into every header if it doesn’t feel natural. 

Keep an Eye on Your Competition

One of the best ways to create engaging content is review the content your competitors produce. Look at their website, social media channels and blogs and compare to your content. Find the source of their backlinks using Ahrefs in hopes of finding some opportunity of your own. What are they doing differently? What type of content do they post? Is it more interactive? Do they have more sponsored posts?

It’s important to know that sometimes certain articles do not attract much traffic due to the seasonality of the post; you can mitigate this by creating evergreen content that will stay relevant throughout the year.

You also want to gauge how successful they are in communicating with their audience. Do they have more social media followers? Does their content have more shares, like or comments?

Be Unique

When creating content, you should always strive to be unique. There are articles on just about everything already, so use your brand’s distinctive voice and style to make the content feel new and exclusive to your site. Use language that they will understand and relate to make a common content topic feel brand new. Offer your own opinions and ideas on industry updates. Readers will appreciate the fresh spin even if on older news. Diversify your content by making your own videos, images, quotes, infographics, memes and interactive content rather than the common text-based blogs.

Summary

Engaging content is what hooks readers and inspires them to explore your site and your brand further. The more interesting and unique your content is, the more your audience will read it, share it and trust your product or service.

When creating engaging content, remember it’s not all about you or your business – it’s all about your audience and what they expect from your brand. Ensure your content addresses the reader’s needs and behaviors so they feel like you are listening to them and you understand their needs. Consider the strategies in this article to create interesting and engaging content that will help to build trust and authority within your brand.