The Australian digital marketing industry is worth a staggering $8.8 billion. Yet despite this huge presence, some companies still have trouble understanding the kinds of marketing they need. How do you cultivate a strong digital presence?
One of the most important aspects for making your website’s visitors into customers is engaging content. There’s a common phrase in digital marketing that is practically cliché at this point: content is king. Cliché or not, it’s true, and content will always be king.
Engaging content makes customers stick around and makes them, well, engage with your site. No more will they bounce off your content and visit a competing site. Instead, they’ll read your site, like what you’re saying, and buy your products or services.
So what are the secrets to creating compelling content? Keep reading and find out!
Use the AIDA Model
The AIDA model is an old copywriting formula that’s been around since at least 1903 when it was pioneered by advertising guru E. St. Elmo Lewis. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. We’ve used it in the intro to this very page.
Let’s take a look at how it works and how you can use it.
Attention
In the attention phase, you need to grab your reader’s attention. A statistic is a great way to do this. Another solid way is to put yourself in the reader’s shoes, describing a situation or problem they may be experiencing.
Interest
Here, you need to stoke the fires of interest in your reader. Tell them more about this problem or situation. For instance, we showed you why web content writing is so important.
Desire
Make your audience understand how your services or products can benefit them. We showed you how web content can benefit your business.
Action
End your introduction with a call to action! This is all about making your reader stay on the page rather than leave. Hook them in and make them stick around. As you’re still here, you can see why this strategy is so effective.
Tailor Your Content to Your Customers
Creating engaging content that plays well with your audience requires you to know what your audience finds interesting and what they don’t. While you might not be able to please everyone with every post, you can still tailor them to your typical customer.
You should be gathering information about your customers however you can. Find out what makes them tick, what they like and what they don’t, how old they are and where they typically live.
Using this information, tailor your content to your customers’ interests. This is a crucial step in figuring out your content marketing strategy. If you put out content that doesn’t fit in with your customers’ lives, they aren’t going to bother reading it and you’ll have wasted your time.
Keep Your Posts the Right Lengths
In Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes, Handley outlines the different lengths that each content should be. Keeping content the right length is key to making it easily digestible and engaging. No one wants to read a thesis-length blog post.
These are the key guidelines to remember:
- Blog posts: 500-2000 words
- Email subjects: 50 characters or fewer
- Paragraphs: no more than 3-4 lines
- Meta description: around 155 characters
- Facebook post: 100-144 characters
Long paragraphs resemble walls of text, which is why keeping them short is important. If you’ve got a lot of information to convey, use subheaders and bullet points to break it down into more manageable chunks.
Have the Knowledge to Back Up Your Engaging Content
When you’re writing engaging content, you don’t want your claims or arguments to fall through a lack of support. While you’re putting together your blog post, research the subject and collect URLs that back up your arguments.
When you think you’ve got enough, research again and see if you can find any new ones. The importance of backing up your argument cannot be understated. It makes your work look more authoritative which leads to better engagement and more interaction.
Be Original
It can be tempting to see content from around the web and try and take that idea and put your own spin on it. It can even be tempting to ask the writer permission to repost these articles on your site.
Don’t do this.
Content is king but this rule only applies to original content. Let’s look at it another way. Before you decided to try your hand at creating compelling content, you were an internet user.
Think about what your reaction would be if you saw a company you love post something similar to an article that you’d already read, would you bother reading it? We don’t think that you would. You’d skip over that post as if nothing was there.
Keep your content smart and keep it original. Seeking inspiration from other posts is fine, but don’t make your own posts too similar.
Be Tonally Consistent
The tone of your writing is one of the most important factors when making engaging content. If you’re marketing for insurance or finance, no one wants a jokey tone like it was written by a bloke from down the pub. If you’re writing about something lighter, no one wants to imagine the person writing it as wearing a suit and tie.
Make the tone of your writing fit your business. This is essential.
Tell a Story
Stories are one of the oldest methods of human communication. Making your posts tell a story can make them far more engaging for your readers.
Use your posts to tell a story, a story of problems and how to solve them. Guess what? The best way for your customers to solve their problems is by having you do it for them with your services or products.
Want Help Making Compelling Content?
If all of this sounds too complex or you don’t have a full-time marketing department, why not hire us to do it for you? We’re an experienced agency based in Melbourne who can help you get the most out of your website.
To learn more about us or our services, get in touch with us!
