If you are spending your time writing content for your customers, you are taking a step ahead of your competition because you understand that online reputation management is important, and that engaging content not only drives traffic to your site and increases sales, it also promotes brand loyalty.
“We see companies who have improved engagement increase cross-sell by 22%, drive up-sell revenue from 13% to 51%, and also increase order sizes from 5% to 85%,” says R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO at Constellation Research, an advisory and research firm. However, how do you truly know if you are engaging your audience, and what do you do if you find that you are not? Read on to find out.
Monitor Traffic
The only way to truly know if your audience is engaging with your content is to monitor traffic that it generates to your site. There are a multitude of free and paid website analytics tools, such as Jetpack, Google Analytics, SimpleReach and Parse.ly, that will give you detailed data about how many people are reading each post, how they are finding that post and how long they stay on each page (the bounce rate).
Once you have this information, you can make an educated decision about which content is most interesting to your readers, and which content provides the best return on investment (ROI) by generating the most sales.
Ask Your Audience
If you want to know what articles are interesting to your audience, simply ask them! It’s easier than ever to connect to your clientbase and start a conversation. You can create a survey on your site, emailing it to your subscriber list and asking people what they want to hear from you. You can also ask these questions on your social media pages or in person. Analyze what your audience wants to hear, and deliver that information to them to create engagement.
Create a Captivating Headline
Online users are so used to being overwhelmed with a flurry of information that they have learned to quickly scan content and pick what they will read in under a second. What grabs the audience’s attention? A captivating and catchy headline!
One study of over 100 million headlines found that the following three phrases led to the most likes, shares and comments on social media:
- “Will make you”
- “This is why”
- “Can we guess”
The study found that emotional headlines that provoked curiosity proved to be the most engaging for audiences.
Create a Call-to-Action
You can write the most useful and interesting blog that will be read by thousands of people, but then what? When you set out to engage your audience, you must always keep in mind what it is you want them to do. Do you want want them to sign up for your newsletter, share the post with others or purchase a product? Tell them to do so!
Including a call-to-action (CTA) in your content will play a big role in turning informational readers into loyal customers! Try including the following proven CTAs in your content:
- Click here to learn more
- Enter this contest here
- Sign up for our newsletter here
- Click here to purchase this product
You may choose to promote your content via advertising and sponsored posts to drive traffic and increase engagement. Or, you may decide to hire a professional content writer to create unique and relevant content for your audience. If you need help affording these services, turn to IOU Financial. We work with small business owners daily to help them grow their businesses with loans of up to $300,000 in 24 hours!
