👋 Great tricks for creating engagement with your audience 📣

Engagement is the buzzword of the moment. Unfortunately, not everyone understands what it really is or how to achieve it. Much of relationship marketing, or inbound marketing, is based on quantitative strategies and data analysis. Engagement, however, goes a little beyond this and is hard to reach.

The word means commitment or, better, involvement.

Although there are several techniques, there is no set recipe for getting customers involved with our brand. So, even though there are no universal solutions, we can study patterns of success.

So what is it, really?

This is a form of interaction between the user and the content. It can translate into 'likes' on Facebook, comments on a blog or shared links.

Before you share your content, identify your goal. Why did you create this post? What do you want people to do with it? Answering these questions can help you decide what kind of content to put out.

For example, if the audience you want to reach is music lovers, an interactive video about famous musicians will work better than an infographic or an article.

Strategies for creating content that generates engagement

Now that you know what it is, let's look at what you can do to create engagement. That way you can increase the number of shares, comments and, ultimately, conversions into business.

1. Create a structure

When you visit a competitor's site or blog, what do you see first? Content presented in a logical way and with an attractive structure. For example, reading a post full of blocks of text can feel overwhelming. To increase readability, you can add bulleted or numbered lists (like this one!), headings, charts and images. See this example:

2. Ask questions

One of the basic foundations of critical thinking is asking and answering. Apply this to your content and you will get people thinking and discussing, even after they leave your blog, social media post or site. An important question at the end of the text can prompt the reader to leave a reply and ask the same question of friends on social media.

3. Lean into controversy

It is not absolutely necessary, but adding a little controversy to ideas or questions can be a great driver of engagement. Sometimes, however, exchanges of comments often turn into heated arguments. Great for generating interaction with your post, but be careful. It is important always to have someone moderating the comments section.

With this post, in 2013, the blog of the author Seth Adams went viral after receiving more than 30 million visits. It was also translated into more than 20 languages and earned him three books. Written by a married man, this title served to attract a great deal of controversy, and an excellent engagement rate.

4. Build trust in the brand

Trust in brands is one of the most important elements of involvement. Remember, people buy from people or companies they like. If you want customers who come back, you need to prove to them that you are trustworthy. Create content that is not highly promotional of products or services. Be altruistic, inspire readers or users.

The site baby.com shows us how to make this work. Dedicated to children's and parenting topics, it is sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, but at no point are the brand name or products advertised on the site. In this way, the company's modesty turned the page into a trusted source of information for new mums around the world. In return, the loyal community of mothers and fathers involved with the brand keeps it always up to date with the needs and wishes of the target audience.

5. Consider giving your brand a face

Customers tend to respond more positively to companies and products that give a face to the name. They like to have someone they associate with a brand. Think, for example, of the Old Spice adverts or, in Portugal, the young model for Surf laundry detergent.

Of course you do not need top models, actors or comedians as the face of your company. You can simply have the owner contributing to the blog, or produce a podcast with a member of the team. Again, the idea is to increase trust in the brand. The more human it is, the more customers will trust it.

If you do not have the budget, you can simply create a similar effect with a voice. For all the content you create, make sure that voice is there.

6. Try interactive content

This is a great way to generate engagement. For example, a video where the visitor sees different options on screen, or an image or piece of information that is revealed after a click.

Even a simple poll (now possible on Facebook) is interactive content.

Using these tools leads the user to interact and stay involved with the brand, which can mean more shares of the content.