As a PR pro, it’s tough to keep your audience engaged. With so much information available, it’s important to find and deliver them the most compelling content. So it begs the question, how do you begin to grab and keep your audience’s attention? We have three simple steps that’ll keep your audience engaged, longing for more content and turn your brand into a prominent content-creating machine.
Content creation can be defined as telling the story before making the sale–which is easier said than done. Companies want to push their products or services, but they forget to show their personality and tell a story. Creating editorial content that isn’t self-promoting is key. When you tell your story without being too obvious in selling your product, rest assured, sales will follow. Here’re some top tips to kick start your next campaign.
1. Be Informative
Your content should always give your target audience information that’s beneficial to them. It should give them takeaways that they can use. You need to adjust the style, gearing it toward where it’s getting published. Blogs, social media, and company websites all have different styles. Blogs and social media can be more fun, while company websites can still be lighthearted but they’re more direct. It’s important to remember that no matter the style, all of your content should have a call to action–but this doesn’t just mean selling your product. You can do things like prompt readers to read your educational blog about hot-button industry topics or review findings from a survey your company created. Oftentimes softer sells rather than hard sells can end up landing your company the deal.
2. Mix Up Style and Format
Information is certainly a big factor in producing great content, but to make an impact you need to have the “wow” factor. Remember, real people are reading your stories, so it has to keep their attention from beginning to end. mages, quotes, comedic anecdotes, statistics, facts, and metaphors are all great ways to not only catch people’s attention, but keep them interested throughout your piece. Another good rule is to have a conversational tone versus being too technical. For example, using common words versus jargon. Name one person who wants to read content that has a word like “obtrusive.” You can’t!. If you’re still unsure, ask yourself, “If I came across this online content, would I read the whole thing?” If it’s a no, try and figure out what went wrong and fix it.
3. Be Relevant
The last rule of creating awesome content is relevance. With so much content out there across an array media types, relevance is the most important of the three tips. Relevance can relate to your company, clients or industry. Writing to a specific audience about might seem easy, but it takes practice.. You need to research the content’s subject and your target audience and make it relevant to both. Once you do this, you can then cast a wider net and capture your audience’s attention.
