5 Ways Content Marketing Gets Better Engagement

Does content marketing work for you? I know many business owners who have struggled with creating and maintaining their website content. They spend hours and days writing blog posts and articles. But despite all their efforts, they don’t connect with their audience or customers.

Have you ever spent hours creating new content, hitting “Publish” and checking your analytics only to see little or no activity?

Sometimes we need a better content marketing strategy to help us create valuable material that will connect with our audience. Below, we’ll touch on five different content types, what they are and why they’re engaging. And of course, we’ll include some good examples so you can see exactly how other businesses have improved their engagement with better content.

1. Informative Content Guides

Not surprisingly, teaching others how to do something is one of the best ways to engage with your audience. Useful, step-by-step guides can be some of the most engaging content you can create. Also, it’s often easy to write up a guide to a common customer problem that readers are often looking to solve.

A couple good examples of informative guides are Your 3 Step Guide to a Marketing Plan That Works and The 5 Step Plan Marketing Research Process. In both cases, they help the reader frame the problem and thoughtfully walk through the solution.

2. Unique Research Content

Customer and industry data can often be summarized into insightful content that captures the attention of your audience. Other variations include case studies, industry research, and market surveys. One of the best benefits of this approach is that you are the only one who can create this content. Uncovering trends or common issues faced by others can be very helpful, especially if you include your evaluation or recommendations.

This small business report surveyed a set of customers and summarized the high-level data to draw insights on the topic of accounting and business finances.

3. Content Visualizations and Infographics

Data visualization and infographics continue to be a great way to engage with your audience. The key is to let the insights you are describing be brought to life through visual design.

LinkedIn and Intuit partnered to create a visually rich creation of freelance personas and breakdown of the 5 Freelancers that Are Changing the World of Work. Note: the original infographic on Linkedin is missing but MarketingProfs has a saved version. The original LinkedIn posts for reference here and here.

4. Article Round-Ups

A Round-Up is the process of summarizing content published by others covering a related topic or industry. In other words, you are curating relevant content for your audience. This works well when you consistently and regularly curate the great content related to your industry.

The benefits are twofold: other content creators appreciate your references and your audience appreciates the time saved. You have scoured the internet for them and found the content worth reading.

Mari Smith has a good example on her blog. She routinely covers a trend or change in social media. Rather than trying to explain everything herself she references three other articles that cover the topic in more depth.

5. Content As Interactive Tools

Interactive tools like online calculators or business quizzes help a specific group answer a nagging question. The most popular use case for calculators is the mortgage calculator used by financial services companies and their marketing partners. Everyone has one since it delivers immediate value to potential customers.

Another great example comes from Hubspot. They’ve earned massive engagement through a tool that helps businesses answer a simple question: “How Strong Is Your Website?”

Conclusion

As you can see, when your content delivers value to your audience, the resulting engagement can be phenomenal. Not all content needs to fit into these categories but when you plan to invest material time and resources into content these various content types work best to help you maximize engagement.

Which one of these tactics can you leverage to get better engagement with your audience?