Content engagement is a term heard throughout the digital marketing landscape. From big businesses to small bloggers, having a high engagement rate is a dream for anyone who has some kind of online presence. Use the following secrets to increase your content engagement.

Audit Existing Content

Even if you’re just beginning your content marketing journey, you can still pull together a report on assets, sales collateral, and blog posts you’ve already written. When you’ve compiled your content assets, ask yourself the following questions for every single website you own:

• What am I communicating to my viewers?
• Is what I’m saying aligning with my strategy?
• Are my messages missing or landing?
• Am I targeting the correct audience?
• What websites/assets/blog posts are performing the best? Why?

Make Content Based on the Customer Journey

The customer journey follows three basic steps: awareness, consideration, and decision. It’s unwise to focus on only one stage because you’ll alienate your customers.

Instead of spending all of your time on top-funnel content (blogs, eBooks, guides), create products that fall into the consideration and decision stage. Otherwise, you’ll have a lot of traffic and no conversions.

Case studies, catalogs, webinars, spec sheets, and free samples help your audience decide on a product, while trials, demos, quotes, consultations, and coupons will earn you the sale.

Improve Your Customer’s Mood

Interact with your audience in a big way by creating content that improves their mood. Include relaxing, heartwarming content that helps your viewers feel more motivated and less sad.

For example, if one of your customers is fed up with the daily grind, they are more likely to locate content that cheers them up. Music, animal videos, and nostalgia can attract new followers from within or outside of your niche, attracting people you never intended to target.

While a targeted approach is more likely to improve your engagement rate, a shotgun approach can still be fruitful. Heartwarming content appeals to everyone, and the more followers you have on social media, the more social proof you gain, and social proof earns you more engagement.

Decide on Content Type

Content marketing encompasses a huge variety of content types, and you don’t have to utilize them all or stick to one specific medium. Always consider your audience when deciding the type of content you want to produce. For example, millennials prefer video content over blogs.

You can still use your videos to reach an older audience with a video transcription service. With this service, you can make two pieces of content for the price of one. However, don’t spread yourself too thin. It’s better to focus on two or three content types that work for your brand.

To better decide on content type, take a look at your data during your content audit. If you can determine what’s successful, you can figure out why and how to replicate said content. Regardless, you should always have a blog because they’re optimal at generating leads.

Choose the Best Social Media Channels

Not every content type is suitable for every channel, and not every customer persona uses all platforms on the Internet. Research your audience and your competition to find out which social media channels see the most growth or interaction within your business niche.

For example, email has the highest conversion rate for most brands, while LinkedIn and YouTube come 2nd and 4th. However, Facebook and Instagram are powerful marketing channels for eCommerce sites, but awful for B2B or B2C businesses.

Track Important Metrics for Your Brand

New businesses can track how well their content is performing by setting goals for their content marketing strategy. If your brand wants to sell $100K in a year, you also need to determine what metrics to follow to ensure that goal is reached. Depending on your goal, track:

• Time on page
• Website traffic
• Email opt-in rates
• Engagement
• Backlinks
• Bounce Rate

You should also concentrate on trends or growth in these metrics. If you notice that your metrics rose when you posted 2 times a week instead of 3, lower your content threshold immediately.

Split Test Content Marketing

The A/B test is a staple technique that compares two versions of a webpage against each other to determine which one performs better. Apps like Google Analytics allow you to track your A/B tests, which can help you optimize your content strategy and website.

Even something as simple as changing your headline can significantly impact your content engagement. In the end, testing takes the guesswork out of website optimization and enables data-informed decisions that shifts the conversation from “we think” to “we know.”

Provide Valuable Social Updates

Digital natives like to be in the know. After all, they grew up in a world where everything was at their fingertips, be it news, education, or friendships.

Although celebrity gossip may seem silly to some, it’s a lifeline for many business professionals who just want to unplug after a hard day.

Any industry can take advantage of this content as long as what they pick appeals to their audience. For example, Newsjacking involves an individual or business piggy-backing off of the latest topics, news, or whatever’s being talked about on social media.

While you’re Newsjacking, take the time to share images and your blog posts on social networks. Not only will pictures increase your engagement, but keeping your followers updated by sharing your latest blog posts will also help you gain traffic and new followers.

Involve Your Community

We’re about to commit a double Newjacking here because we’re going to explain how you can provide even more social value to your community. Since many of us connect with others who have similar interests, we often seek out groups and content that make us feel included.

However, we want all of this content to be delivered at lightning-fast speeds, which is why video and listicle content receive high views. Audiences are 10x more likely to share, engage and comment on video content than other text-based social media posts.

What’s more, you don’t have to work as hard to produce trendy content as you need to post it immediately. To involve your community, focus on providing easy to absorb content.