A 5-Step Guide to Writing Engaging Content for Your Business
Have you ever thought about writing engaging content?
Chances are that you have, but you never paid much attention to it.
Do you remember a Pinterest infographic on content marketing, or a tweet on writing content, or a YouTube Video on writing a helpful blog post?
Let us explain the importance of writing engaging content for your business.
The written content on the web has never been this important in the past few years.
As social media is maturing, the dynamics of marketing are changing accordingly. The attention-shift of consumers from radio, television, and billboards to smartphones, social media, and on-demand content is significantly relevant to modern-day marketing.
The exciting part is that marketing is still the same art of getting attention but through different mediums.
The internet, however, provides an opportunity to produce various forms of content such as text, audio, video, and picture, which eventually helps marketers leverage the content for the better.
Let’s learn more:
How to write engaging content
We’re going to shed some light on the text content to help you shape your written content from the marketing standpoint.
In this blog post, you’ll learn:
- How to write content
- What makes content engaging
- How engaging content helps the business
- How to make content helpful for readers
- How to leverage good-quality content for business growth
We’ll break down the process of writing engaging content into five steps:
1. Specify the Target Audience
It’s a fundamental requirement to know before creating engaging content.
How would you reach out to the right audience if you don’t know who they are?
For instance, are they male, female, below 18, students, single-parent, or small business owners? Such demographic information would help you understand the target audience.
You can’t set out on a journey without figuring out where you want to end up. Similarly, it’s necessary to work on specifying your target audience beforehand.
Many businesses blindly start pushing out content on their websites without genuinely understanding the prospective audience.
It’s highly unlikely that the content would perform if you aren’t sure why you’re creating that content.
2. Create a Provocative Blog Title
It’s impossible to pull this off if the topic you’re going to discuss is boring.
You have to come up with an exciting topic to write about if you want to engage your readers.
No matter how skilled you are at your craft or how good you are at writing blogs, embrace the fact that people will scroll through their timeline without clicking your content if it doesn’t interest them.
When we say the provocative title, we don’t mean “clickbait” in the blog post title.
Instead, a provocative blog post title evokes clarity, attractiveness, and curiosity in it.
Readers should get curious to check out the blog when they look at the title, whether it’s on social media or in the newsletter.
So create a blog title that pushes people to take action instead of scrolling through unnoticed.
3. Use Easy-to-Understand Wording
You might not want to trip people off with your fantastic vocabulary.
If you want to put your vocabulary to good use, go easy on big words. Instead, try to use common words that are easy to understand for everyone.
One of the essential elements of business communication is understandability. Your strong words won’t matter if the audience doesn’t know what’s going on there.
Many pro-bloggers teach and preach the same thing; if you check out Problogger, a popular blog on “blogging tips,” you’ll notice it uses understandable (English) language. Copyblogger does the same thing.
4. Hook Your Readers to Keep Reading
One of the core ingredients of writing engaging content is hooking your readers to the content.
Readers should stick to your content once they start reading it. To make that happen, not only do you need engaging content, but you also need examples and stories.
Have you noticed that top bloggers and influencers in online marketing use screenshots and outbound links to explain their points? They do this because it helps them convey the message to you while maintaining your focus and attention on their words.
Examples and stories are great when it comes to creating a hook with the readers. People can relate to others when they hear stories.
As a content writer or blogger, you must be infiltrating your content with stories and examples that resonate with the topic.
5. Solve a Problem with Your Content
If you want to engage readers with your content, then make sure you’re trying to solve their problem in the first place. Otherwise, they won’t be interested in giving their time to your write-up.
Hundreds of thousands of blog posts are being published every day – this space is kind of noisy. So you better come up with a plan for solving your target audience’s problems.
If you’re a business, ensure that your content is aligned with your company’s goals, especially from the marketing standpoint. We don’t want you to start cold selling through your content. Instead, try to build a connection with your readers.
As an audience member, it becomes almost impossible to ignore content if it seems to be solving your problem.
The main question is how WE would know the problem of the audience.
Here comes step number one again: you must know your audience. That way, you’ll be aware of who your audience is and what your audience does; you are likely to figure out what problems they face.
For example, it’s impossible for a social media manager to not know about popular social media sharing tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Quuu.
So pay close attention to solving the problems of your audience through your content.
Let’s Wrap Up
Writing engaging content doesn’t mean that every blog post must go viral. It’s not even remotely close to that.
The purpose of sharing this guide was to help you in writing content that matters – a lot of companies and solopreneurs put out content on their blogs that doesn’t stand out. We want you to publish content that is hard to ignore and easy to read.
The next time you sit down to write a blog post for your company, remember that you WANT TO SOLVE A PROBLEM. You’re not just looking out for search engine traffic.
The secret is that if you somehow pull this off, meaning you hit the sweet spot, you’d land loads of visitors from various places, including search engines.
So before you leave this page, please answer a simple question:
In your experience what makes content engaging?
Let us know in the comments below.
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