Marketing is a booming industry. The incessant and rampant rise of consumerism has resulted in people buying goods and items to show off and use them as a status symbol. Naturally, that means that a proportionate amount of people invest in the creation of these goods so that they can sell them. Naturally, that has resulted in tough competition. Just look at the mobile phone industry. Every year, companies like Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, Oppo, Sony, etc., unveil new phones. And despite having perfectly working phones, people still clamor to buy new ones because that is important to their self-image. So, how do these companies that are making essentially the same product get people to buy from them? Through marketing, they use different techniques and strategies to market their products in engaging ways. One such way is the use of blogging. Go to any company’s site that we mentioned before, they will have a blog post about their latest product that shows how it’s the best one out there. And it works! These things fly off the shelves. As marketers, we all want to emulate this success, and today we will teach you how to create content for your marketing blog.
Tips for Creating Engaging Content for a Marketing Blog
Here are some tips for creating engaging content for marketing blogs. By following these tips you will be able to recreate the success of great marketers.
Learn About Your Audience First
To write engaging content, you have to know about your customers first. You need to know what kinds of things speak to them and what will hold their attention. For that, you need to do some detailed research.
Here is what you need to find out about your audience.
- Their interests
- Their age group
- Approximate geographical location
This information is required for you to create engaging content for them. When you can target their interests and use language that is interesting to their age group while supplementing it with local knowledge, you can hold their attention. To gather all of this information you can do the following things.
- Have people register on your websites and platforms
- Track their activities on your company platforms
- See what kind of ads and posts they interact with
- See what they ignore
- Analyze their comments (if they leave any)
All of this information will help you get better at marketing to your audience. Once you have this data, you want to create different audience personas. Each persona should cater to a specific combination of age, interests, and geographical region.
Be Unique And Original
A marketing blog needs to host unique and original content if it wants any hope of being successful at generating and converting leads. Unique content drives engagement because of two major advantages.
- Google and other search engines prefer unique content, so they rank it higher in the SERPs
- Your audience also prefers unique content because they don’t want to see old and reused information over and over again.
So, when you write articles for your marketing blog, you want to make sure that the content is as unique as it can be. So, how can you write unique and original content? here are some actionable steps for you to follow.
- Google the topic you want to write on. See what other kinds of stuff have been written on it. You want to know what you have to avoid to keep your content original.
- Gather background information on your topic. You need to have a great understanding of your blog topic because that adds authority which helps with the conversion of leads.
- Brush up on your writing and paraphrasing skills because inevitably, you will need to use some content from other sources. To differentiate your article from others, you will need to significantly change the wording of the work.
That last part is not mandatory because you can do that with the help of tools. If you really have to use some content from another source, try to paraphrase online with the help of tools. It is a valid content strategy because it helps you save time and effort while writing articles for your marketing blog.
Write Actionable Content
Marketing blogs are a sort of service. Your company is trying to educate your audience about its products and services via blogging. As such the content creation process requires some thought and care. The number one requirement is that the content must be useful and actionable.
If the information provided in the article is not actionable, it is of no use to the people. As such the engaging factor lessens by a lot and makes your blog less appealing. That does not help with conversions and digital marketing. Copywriting techniques for interesting phraseology can only take you so far.
If you have noticed, even in this article, we are providing you with information that you can act on to actually make your marketing blog flourish. If we didn’t you would have no reason to be here. So, make sure that you offer practical advice through your e-commerce platform for blogging.
Use Images And Other Visual Elements
Engagement is very dependent on perception. That’s why using catchy visuals to manipulate the perception of your audience has been a successful marketing strategy for so long.
Granted, catchy visual elements are usually prevalent in other forms of marketing such as telemarketing rather than content marketing. That still does not mean that content marketing efforts cannot take advantage of these things.
For example, if you are writing a content marketing blog where you are trying to implicitly advertise a product, you can add images of that product. For example, in an e-commerce marketing blog about photography and how to take the perfect photo, you could add an image of a camera that your company sells to illustrate certain steps.
Another visual element that can aid you is a graph. Instead of spouting numbers, just plot them on a chart or a graph, add them to your blog post, and use them as a marketing tool. Catchy visual elements tend to stick in the reader’s mind. They also help to provide a ton of information quickly and conveniently. That boosts the blog’s engagement.
As a content marketer, you will be pleased to know that images open a new avenue for search engine ranking. Google ranks images for search as well. By adding images relevant to the content, you open it up for more organic traffic through image search. That is a great marketing trend that you should start applying soon.
Write Catchy Headlines
Catchy headlines are the bread and butter of internet marketing. Without a catchy headline, you cannot attract any audience to begin with. In digital marketing and content marketing, the headings need to have an impact. The more impactful the heading the higher the chances of people actually reading them.
That’s one reason why clickbait titles and headings are so common. The marketing expert says something outrageous in the heading so that people come and read the marketing blog. Then they sideline them with something else and bring them around to the actual topic.
This specific example is really bad for customer experience, so we advise you not to use it, but it is enough to show you the power of attractive headlines. So, if you want to earn your place in your audience’s favorite marketing blogs, you should start optimizing your headlines.
Here are some steps for doing so.
- Include your main keyword in the heading. This keyword is typically linked to customer queries.
- Pose your heading as a question
- Add numbers in the heading if possible. Numbers tend to stand out compared to work.
- Relate the headline to your audience’s pain point
- Try to evoke some kind of emotion through the headings.
By doing this, your marketing blog will provide better customer experiences and increase the conversion rate of leads.
Practice Writing Hooks In Your Intro
One thing you need to know about writing a marketing blog is that your hook game must be on point. It is no use having helpful content if you cannot hook your readers first. So, to establish a strong online presence, focus on funneling your audience to the helpful content in your blogs.
To do that you need to have catchy titles which we already discussed before. The second part is the introduction to your blog post. A nice introduction hooks an audience and compels them to read the content. You already know how to write compelling content, so the only thing left is to write a great intro. Here are some tips for that.
- Add some startling or shocking statistic in your opening paragraph
- Write a thought-provoking question
- Instantly start addressing the customer’s pain point
- Use humor
- Try to tell a story
- Make it relatable by sharing something from your experience
But no matter what you do, keep it short and you will quickly find that your marketing blog has become your audience’s favorite blog.
Use A Conversational Tone
The audience wants content that makes them feel as if they are being spoken to. When you provide such content, you will foster an online community that sticks with you through thick and thin. This is a great marketing method. The marketing industry jumped on this method as soon as they realized that’s what the customers wanted.
There is no reason for you not to do so. You can start by employing a casual and conversational tone in your writing. Your online marketing community will help you find out which tone you should employ. Some of your community members may like a professional tone, but others would like an enthusiastic and uplifting tone.
Neil Patel Using a Conversational Tone in his Blog_Source
You should have this information when you do your audience research and create personas. The point of doing this is to improve engagement and conversion optimization. You want as much organic search traffic as possible, and you want that traffic to convert. Treating them like a human rather than a number will help with that.
Go the extra mile with your conversational skills to ensure that the content they read becomes their favorite article. This is a great digital marketing strategy that helps with search engine optimization by way of increasing engagement. The more engagement an article generates the better its search engine optimization. Therefore, it will rank higher and get more organic search traffic.
Format The Digital Marketing Blogs For Scanning
In online marketing, conversion rate optimization is necessary. Conversion rates are closely linked to engagement. That’s why you are reading this blog on creating engaging content. You may already know how an SEO tool, copywriting, and knowledge of industry trends help digital marketers create a popular blog.
But did you know that something as simple as formatting has a huge effect on blog engagement? Formatting refers to the way the information is segmented and presented in blog posts. Poor formatting can bury even insightful content according to SEO experts. The reason is that poor formatting makes it hard to read, so even if you have insightful articles on your blog, people won’t engage with them because they are hard to read.
To make the most of formatting try to arrange your content in a way that is easy to skim. Here’s how you can do that.
- Use headings and subheadings to distinguish between subtopics.
- Use bullet points whenever you have to list something.
- A good content marketing strategy is to use short paragraphs, typically three to five lines long.
- Popular posts usually have headings that are around 150 words long, so try to incorporate that into your writing.
- Employ your copywriting skills to write great excerpts and put them in callout boxes to bring attention to important points and feature announcements quickly.
Do all of that and you will find that your blog posts become highly engaging.
Conclusion
Writing an engaging blog post for marketing is a broad task. There are many things you can do to raise the engagement of your articles. In this blog post, we discussed eight tips that can help you do that. Some of these tips are all but mandatory and others you can choose to apply later. But they will all help you to create highly engaging content for your blog.
So, the mandatory tips are to learn about your audience and find their interests and demographics. Then create content that appeals to them. Then your content must always be unique with actionable advice. Otherwise, people will think it’s useless. Catchy headlines and images paired with good formatting will also add a lot of attractiveness to the content.
So, there you have it. Use these tips and make your marketing efforts successful.
Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of two blogs: InterCool Studio and CareersMomentum. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers with White Hat SEO techniques. Besides being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.
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