Three Ways to Engage Your Target Audience With Your Content
Are you having trouble creating content that truly connects with your target audience? Between websites, mobile apps and social media, computer and mobile phone users suffer from serious content overload. You need to do something that makes your content stand out. Read on to learn three simple, highly actionable ways to make your content connect with the audience you want.
Study What Works
Have you taken the time to study the traits of your most successful content? You may find that your target audience isn't the audience you actually have. Let's suppose, for example, that your website's topic is digital cameras. You use affiliate marketing to generate income, and your target audience consists of people who are new to digital photography and haven't purchased their first cameras yet. When you look at your website's most popular articles, you see titles such as these:
- 10 Hacks to Improve Your Camera's Digital Zoom
- How to Improve Your Camera's Memory Card Performance
- Take Better Pictures of People With These Focus Settings
If these are your website's most popular articles, you can safely conclude that the majority of your readers already own digital cameras. Therefore, your target audience isn't the audience you have. Can you alter your website's revenue model to take advantage of the traffic you receive? If not, you need to do a better job of tailoring your content to appeal to the target audience. Article titles such as these may attract more readers who don't own cameras yet:
- Top Five Digital Cameras for Beginners
- The Seven Features Your First Digital Camera Must Have
- The Three Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Digital Camera Buying Experience
Tailor Your Content for the Platform
People who read blog posts often prefer longer, more informative posts with titles such as the ones mentioned above. However, longer posts may not get the response you desire on social media. People often read tweets or check their Facebook timelines while they watch television or engage in other activities. In other words, they aren't devoting their full attention to what they're reading online.
Social media users often prefer short content that's quick to skim and easy to digest. The average Twitter user, for example, has more than 200 followers and receives a constant stream of messages. If a social media follower clicks one of your links and sees a 2,000 word essay, they're probably not going to read it -- at least not right away. If you're lucky, some will come back and read the content later. Most will not.
Of course, to even see that 2,000 word wall of text, a social media user would need to click the link in the first place. If you want your content to stand out from the rest of the static your social media followers receive, you need to create punchy headlines. Study the most successful users on your chosen social media platform to find out what works.
Inspire Emotion
Sometimes, you need to do more than provide information if you really want a blog or social media post to generate engagement. If you're having trouble connecting with your audience, try to provoke an emotional response instead. Let's look at some of the ways in which you might be able to alter the sample article titles above to inspire emotion and drive people to click the link:
- The Five Signs That Your Camera is a Waste of Money (capitalizes on frustration with poor quality products)
- 50 Images That Prove You're Using Your Camera Wrong (anger, incredulity)
- You Won't Believe What This Photographer Found in the Background of a Wedding Photo (curiosity, surprise)
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Jesse Boskoff is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder at Status Labs, overseeing strategy for all of Status Labs' robust digital campaigns. A decade-long veteran of understanding and working with search engines and search engine algorithms, Boskoff concocts the perfect blend of digital and traditional public relations solutions for each client based on specific need. As a direct result of Boskoff’s dynamic approach to designing customized online reputation solutions, Status Labs experienced a growth in revenue of 939% between 2012 and 2015. Previously, he served as Director of Marketing at FanDuel, where his advertising strategies were applauded in an article in Psychology Today.