The primary purpose of content development is to connect with your audience and create an environment where they trust you enough with their resources (buy whatever product you are selling), and for this to happen, the content you develop should create a sense of belonging with your audience.

It’s quite easy to develop content that doesn’t facilitate engagement with your audience. This indirectly positions you as being interested solely in their pocket without showing interest or concern on if your product is what they need. And even if it is, how does it solve their problem?

Content marketing is a bit tricky, as there is a thin line between developing content to drive engagement and developing content to market your brand’s product or services. If you’re not careful, you can end up with 100 Posts with little to zero engagement.

If you are wondering why your content is not getting engagement, let alone sales, this may be why. In this article, I will be sharing proven tips that can help you develop content that drives engagement across different content marketing strategies like email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, etc.

Let’s get down to why your content should drive engagement.

Why Should Content Drive Engagement?

1. Audience Retention

According to Statista, as of April 2022, there were more than five billion internet users worldwide, which is 63.1 percent of the global population. With that 5 billion internet users, you can be sure that there are business and personal brands that develop content to satisfy the needs of this large number.

This literally means that if Brand A develops content that doesn’t satisfy Person F, there are other options for Person F to pick from. Now, imagine you have 100 Person Fs who are not convinced because your content does not engage them, you just lost 100 people from your audience who had the potential of becoming paying customers if only you were able to nurture them.

When you develop content that engages your audience, you are on your way to retaining your audience and even your customers.

If your content is engaging, you are more likely to have returning customers who are willing to pull their family members and friends to purchase from you.

Repeat customers have been found to spend an average of 67% more than new customers.

2. Audience Trust

Developed content that facilitates engagement convinces your audience that you are interested in them the same way you are interested in them purchasing your product or services.

People see through our actions and the moment they can sense intentionality in your content, you have them pinned.

They are willing to trust you, or even put their money on the line for you.

Don’t forget that content marketing is a tool for your digital marketing to be effective. The relationship your audience has with you is based on the content you develop and share with them. Content that drives engagement is the foundation for trust with your audience.

3. Brand Visibility

Content developed to drive engagement generates visibility for your brand, as it pulls in your audience and also potential clients from search engines via Search Engine Optimization. When your audience engages with your content and it generates activities, it signals the algorithm to recommend your brand for topics or information in relation to what your developed content is about.

For example, Sycamore NG – a Fintech company in Nigeria – has a feature called Loan friends where you can loan your friends money from the app. If their content has the loan friends theme or title on a digital platform, the algorithm will most likely recommend them to internet users who are looking for that topic or something similar.

Search engine optimization also works the same way, but in this case, the crawler crawls through all digital pages on the internet and indexes pages that are similar to each other in terms of keyword, topic, content, and brand identity.

The moment an internet user tries to find that particular brand, it displays brands with similar or exact keywords as the internet user is requesting. It displays them on what is called Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Now that I have explained why you need to develop content that engages with your audience, let’s move to how you can develop this content. Remember that content can be written, audio, video, or infographics.

How to Develop Content to Drive Engagement

1. Identify your Target Audience

A target audience is a specific group of people who will need your product and whose need your product or services will be solving.

They are also the set of people you expect to have access to your content and products.

If you did not have a specific market for your product at inception, it might be difficult for you to draft and identify this. If you already have a market segment while you are planning and developing your product, you can easily find your target audience.

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For example, your market segment could be young people between the age of 18 and 35. Your target audience is not everybody who falls within that category but people who fall within that category and also:

1. Has a need for your product or services offered
2. Has the potential for the need to arise

Using the loan friends feature as an example, your target audience will be people who are between the ages of 18 – 35 and are looking for an alternative to borrow money from their friends. This way, your content and product offering must be targeted at them and not just a vague audience.

You are on your way closer to solving your problem of no engagement of your content when you can identify who your target audience is.

2. Create a User Persona

After you must have identified who your audience is, you should create a user persona that is not void of reality. Not void of reality in the sense that you should make it seem real, even though it is meant to be an imaginary description of who your customer is.

Be realistic with your recommendation. This way, you have the assurance that indeed your product will meet the needs of your target audience and as such you have an idea of how to develop content that would engage your audience.

A buyer persona should have the following:

• Demographics
• Interest
• Career choice
• Attitude
• Painpoint
• etc

The elements of the buyer persona would depend largely on your brand and the solutions it will bring. See the example below.

You can also choose to carry out a survey amongst people who fit into your target audience. This way, you won’t be living in your imagination when it’s time to develop content. You will also indeed be developing content to serve your target audience and facilitate engagement.

You can read this article to learn how to create buyer personas in email marketing.

3. Develop Content that Solves a Specific Problem Common to your Audience

At this point, you have to get your hands dirty researching and identifying how to develop content in a way that positions you as being empathic and a problem solver.

Yes, your content should provide solutions to problems your target audience may be having. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should solve all their problems, but they should be able to trust you so that whenever they come to you, they can find something they need.

With the audience or buyer persona, you will have possible problems that your potential audience may have. At the same time, you are positioning your brand as a solution with whatever product or services you have to offer.

4. Interact with your Audience

There is a temptation of isolating yourself from your audience for whatever reason. If you indeed want to facilitate engagement for the content you share, please don’t isolate. Allow your audience to see the human behind your brand. They should be able to connect with you.

When they drop a comment on your post on social media, don’t leave them in ghost mode. When they reply to your email, don’t assume that they know you are busy.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shared why you need to develop content for engagement and I also shared how you can develop content in whatever format to engage your audience. There are so many possibilities in the digital world if only we are willing to put our hands on deck and use them as leverage for the growth of our brands.

More articles for you to read

Content Marketing: Definition and Importance

10 Digital Marketing Tips for Business Owners

Content Repurposing: the WHAT and the HOW

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