How to Create Engaging Content: 7 Ways

When visitors land on your page, do they stick around for a while or do they bounce away? Most people go to a site looking for information on a specific topic or with the intent to buy. Providing the engaging content your target audience wants isn’t easy, but you can accomplish this by studying your typical site visitors and answering their most pressing questions. If you answer questions your competitors don’t, that’s even better for your branding.

There are approximately 1,874,655,290 websites on the internet. While this number varies from second to second, what this means for your business is that there is a lot of competition out there. Standing out from all your competitors isn’t easy, but the first step to being memorable is adding engaging content.

There is more than one type of content, but creating engaging content is about more than just the type you offer. Here are seven ways to create more engaging content for your readers:

1. Answer Pressing Questions

Does your content answer the most pressing questions site visitors have? One way to clue into these questions is by looking at what search strings brought them to your site in the first place. Today’s search engine browsers often type in questions to find what they’re looking for. You can also search for popular keywords in your industry. Make sure your content answers those questions.

Scotts is known for its menswear, and it seems to know its audience well. The target audience is young, single men who want to look fashionable but masculine at the same time. The information on its blog directly applies to that demographic, with articles such as “Five Things to Do on Valentine’s Day if You’re a Single Man.” By keying into search phrases this target audience seeks, Scotts draws them to its website and hopefully keeps them there.

2. Use Strong Opening Hooks

Site visitors make up their minds about your site in mere seconds. If you don’t grab the person from the minute they land on your page, you risk them bouncing away to a competitor. Using strong opening hooks in your content draws the reader into the article and makes them want to read on.

An opening hook can be a question, a shocking statement, a quote or some interesting fact. The key is to engage the reader while also explaining what the piece will be about. The best way to learn how to write an enticing opening line is by studying the work of excellent writers and seeing how they accomplish this task.

3. Add Video

About one-third of all online activity goes to video watching. It only makes sense to add a video to your website so visitors can absorb content quickly and effortlessly. Don’t just add a video to add a video, though. Make sure it adds value to your site by providing information or answering a question site visitors might have.

Note the video for One Point Partitions and how it showcases the way you can lay out a public restroom facility. The video clearly shows how the partitions go together and how easy things such as the locks, handles and hooks are to install.

4. Know Your Purpose

Before you add a single piece of content to your website, you should know the purpose of that content. What do you hope to accomplish by writing this article or posting this video? The purpose doesn’t always have to be to gather more sales, but you should have a purpose, even if it is just to educate your site visitors.

Your purpose will likely tie into what your customers want to know and who they are as a group. If your customers are mainly millennials, they’ll expect your content to entertain them while informing. Older generations may be satisfied with an infographic that lays out the info in understandable terms.

5. Share the Value

Internet gurus recommend sharing the value of your content with site visitors. This simply means you state what they’ll gain from watching a video or reading a guide and why this information is precious — even if you offer it free. This engages the user from the very beginning because they know there is a reward for investing their time.

Kimpton Hotels offers a Life Is Suite blog where it delves into topics related to the city visitors might travel to. For example, one of the topics is springtime in Denver. It indicates it has a list of musts you need to know about if you’re traveling to Denver in the spring. This entices those travelers to click on that content and read it.

6. Conduct Quizzes

Use quizzes to direct your site visitors to the exact product or area they’re seeking. One example of this type of method is Birchbox. The company used a quiz to help consumers find their “facemask soul mate” and wound up with $7,260 in orders. The quiz is short but helps guide consumers to specific products that cater to their needs.

7. Add Visuals

You likely already know people process visuals much better than they do text alone. Visual content is powerful. When people hear info, they only remember about 10 percent of that information a few days later. However, add a relevant image, and they retain about 65 percent of the same information in the same time period. If you want your site to be memorable, add infographics, graphs, charts and photos that go along with your content.

Engage Content for Your Visitors

In order to keep your visitors engaged and coming back to your website, you need to add content and add it regularly. However, as we’ve seen through the studies above, that content needs to have a purpose and be presented in a way that draws site visitors in. With just a few minor tweaks, you can accomplish this and turn casual visitors into lifelong customers.