Writing What You Want to Read – 5 Audience Engagement Strategies to Increase User Engagement
0 If people aren’t reading your website content – or they’re moving away from it quickly – it is because of this one thing: You’re not respecting your audience’s time. It is essential that you write engaging content. We are covering the best 5 audience engagement strategies in today’s article.
If you are not respecting your reader’s time, you are robbing their time, by publishing content that:
(a) Doesn’t speak to your target audience’s needs or concerns,
(b) Is confusing, and/or
(c) Is sloppily formatted
And all those, my friend, are exactly what your readers do not want.
Let’s look at five audience engagement strategies
How to Increase User Engagement?
There are many strategies to increase user engagement. These are the five most efficient user engagement strategies that you can follow. These strategies have been proven right on many other occasions.
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I. Focus On Their Pain Points & Benefits
Content has the most impact when it focuses on solving people’s “pain points”. You can increase user engagement by focusing on pain points.
For example, if your website is promoting new gadgets, you are going to talk about the great features and specs of the product. However, if you want to get into the hearts and minds of your customers, your content needs some closure.
Will those cool features or specs mean something to your target audience? Or will it improve their day to day life?
Topics based around pain points will effectively drive conversions. Your job is to think the problems your audience generally has. You can then write your content addressing how they can solve their issues.
Neil Patel is pro at this technique. The blog posts they write help resolves customers pain points, but they aren’t a one-stop solution to turbocharging a company’s online revenue, So shouldn’t you.
Talking about pain points is a great user engagement strategy that you can follow to drive more traffic to your website.
II. Get Straight To The Point
If we are honest, many people don’t actually “read” every word of what they read. When it comes to consuming online contents, most of us are generally scammers.
You can provide your users with a table of content to give them a clear idea about what to expect. Learn how you can create anchor links and table of content in WordPress
People like to read clear and concise articles
That means, they tend to scan your content before deciding actually to read it. You have mere microseconds to capture their attention and interest. So, if you have something important to communicate on your website, you’d better say it fast, clear and concise. Telling it quickly makes a great first impression and is considered one of the best audience engagement strategies.
You have only a couple of seconds to grab your reader’s attention
The two rules are pretty standard:
- Tell them what you’re going to tell them
- Don’t over-explain
Remember this, too much information can distract from the most important stuff – and ultimately confuse your readers.
Getting straight to the point is a great user engagement strategy that has been proven from time to time to increase user engagement on your website.
III. Speak Directly To Your Readers
When we say speak directly to the individual, we mean to use words like “you” and “your” instead of writing the generic “everyone” term.
The word you is considered the most persuasive, powerful, and attention-grabbing word you could ever use in your content. It makes perfect sense. As we covered in our article about 8 Best Blogging Practices to Increase User Engagement, referring to “YOU” has a significant impact on increasing user engagement on your website.
Why?
Believe it or not, this type of language creates a level of trust and intimacy with
you and the person reading your content. You’re making them feel important and valued, which is what makes them feel appreciated!
For instance, “Are You Missing Out On TED Presentations?”, “Should You Be Spending More Time On Blogs?”.
Would these titles be engaging if we didn’t use “you”? Using YOU has better chances to increase user engagement.
Chances are when your readers feel nurtured and brought home good experiences from reading your blogs; they are most likely to stick around for a long, long time.
IV. A Unique Post
Coming up with 100% original blog post ideas is not easy. The competition for high-quality content is intense – and it’s growing. With so much information on the web these days, chances are, most of the things we write has already been written by influential bloggers.
What should you do then? There is a trick though.
Find a new angle.
You don’t necessarily need an original idea to craft unique contents. You can always develop your content by adding the right dose of creativity in any topic your audience is interested in.
For example, if someone already wrote about “10 Reasons Why Organic Search Is Beneficial To Your SEO”, you can run with “Organic vs. Paid Search: Learn the difference.”
There are endless variations and spins you can think of. So, it’s possible to achieve originality. It just takes hard work and practice.
V. Able To Put Their Trust On You
The ultimate goal of your blog posts is to create trust, which you do by giving readers something of value, backing it up with research, and then showing them how it benefits them.
Trust is the foundation for everything we do. Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gave an eye-opening talk on building and rebuilding trust. She takes a quick crash course in trust. In 15 minutes she explained how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it. She shared her experience how they built trust again while working at Uber
[You can also read the article at Recode about how she fixed Uber’s culture]
Trust cannot be created overnight, or in one blog post. It comes from familiarity, consistency, and transparency.
Bonus: Increase User Engagement via Social Media
Would you believe Coca- Cola has the most number of followers both on Facebook and Twitter?
Coca-Cola currently has more than 197M Facebook followers and 3.33M Twitter Followers.
How can a company be so good in offline sales and in online promotion?
One of the main reason behind this is they keep reinventing their social media channels with different campaigns. See this infographic to know about the social media influence Coca-Cola was able to create with their online promotions.
Social Media has been proven as one of the most influential user engagement metrics in the last few years. Although Coca-Cola sales are primarily dominated offline, they still have one of the most influential social media channels. The user engagement model has boosted their sales up to 2x.
Take a look at our Social Media Autoposting guideline to make sure you reach your audience in all social media platform.
Final Words on Audience Engagement Strategy
Regular blog posts with quality multimedia, social proof and a willingness to reveal behind-the-scenes information (case studies, data-driven piece) help to build trust.
We know it’s tough to maintain SEO, writing quality content and market them at the same time. But that’s how you make a difference. Follow the best audience engagement strategies to make sure you provide value to your audience.
Write great content, build trust and do not forget to SEO optimize your article with a WordPress SEO Guide.
Also, make sure to improve PageSpeed on WordPress websites for a fast and sleek experience.
Disclosure: WP Hive earns a commission when you buy through partner links. It does not influence the unbiased opinions of our writers. Learn more →
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Saif Hassan
Product Manager by passion & profession. Lead Product Manager at weDevs, former PM @ Poptin. Passionate about writing & tech. He's an advocate of Human-Centered Design and believes that websites and the tools used to build them should be well crafted, intuitive, and accessible. Cyclist. Reader. A WordPress ninja 🥷, HCI expert & a design thinker 💡
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