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Eight Highly Effective Content Marketing Strategies To Boost Engagement

YEC
POST WRITTEN BY
Expert Panel, Young Entrepreneur Council

These days, customer engagement all comes down to good content. Whether your company is crafting blog posts or producing videos, content is the name of the game as far as reaching your target audience goes. Well-crafted content has the ability to drive customers straight to your company door. Even further, niche content brings in specific clients who are already loyal to your vision or goal.

There are a million pieces of content marketing advice out there. It can be difficult to know which strategies will be the most effective and garner the most audience engagement. To help, these eight members of Young Entrepreneur Council share the content they’ve seen succeed, along with practical marketing steps to drive more content-based traffic.

All photos courtesy of YEC members.

1. Data-Driven Studies

We produce studies that analyze the sleeping habits of thousands of consumers to get a better understanding of the positive and negative implications of certain behaviors. We summarize our findings in an easy-to-digest manner that helps to educate audiences about smarter ways to sleep. As a result, we often identify interesting correlations between sleep and happiness, sleep and health, and sleep and productivity that are both insightful and newsworthy. Our studies generate the most engagement for us because many news sites, blogs and influencers link to and share our reports, providing us with free publicity and reach. For other brands, I recommend producing original surveys to share unique data they may find within their respective categories or industries. - Firas KittanehAmerisleep

2. Long-Form Content

We have increasingly mandated that our clients convert their conventional blogging to long-form content blogging and industry writing. One particularly successful example of long-form content is industry guides that are often 3-4K words. From these guides, that are both useful internally for marketing and awareness, and externally for SEO, we observe increases in SEO traffic and engagement. Certain industries are highly competitive in this realm, such as health and beauty, but long-form SEO still competes in this arena, a signal of its rise and longevity. - Matthew CapalaAlphametic

3. User-Generated Content

User-generated content that we report has resulted in high engagement. This isn't surprising because even though we are acknowledging one individual, that individual reflects our customer base and how they see and respond to our brand. We highly encourage our customers to share their experiences with our product, whether it is through reviews or direct social media posts. This opens an avenue for us to engage with them and share their take with our community, which builds trust and unity. It also becomes a way for us to learn more about how they respond to our products and, in turn, we can iterate and most importantly make sure that they feel heard. Our customers come first so the more we build a relationship with them, the more they become part of our journey. - Stephanie VermaasTHIS IS A LOVE SONG LLC

4. Social Media Content

The two-way street of social media gives you easy means to interact with your target audience in different ways. However, it is important that you follow a pronged approach. Polls are now part of popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Using polls works well in capturing user attention, and they’re very effective conversation starters. Quizzes are another way to get people to click through to your website. But make the quizzes you share via social media informal and fun. When done right, both can increase user engagement significantly. Videos are among the most engaging forms of online content as of today, and there appears to be no slowing down in their upward trend anytime soon. Professional photos and infographics might require your attention, too. - Derek RobinsonTop Notch Dezigns

5. Content Tackling Current Events

We found that when we write content that somehow relates to current world events, it creates a lot more engagement than when it's general "evergreen" content. For example, if you are writing content for a client in the home improvement vertical, a blog post entitled "5 Ways to Protect Your Home From a Hurricane" would do way better than a general title like "5 Ways to Make Your Home More Secure." People tend to keep up with the news in their region, and they like to discuss the news on social media, especially if they feel a personal or emotional connection to the topic. Taking advantage of trending and popular hashtags on Twitter is also a great way to ensure your content is seen and put in front of a relevant audience. - Amine RahalIronMonk

6. How-To Guides

For our audience of founders of companies in the early stages of their lifecycle (at or just before their first institutional round), we find that “how to” still draws the most attention. How to build a pitch deck, how to get your books ready for due diligence, how to identify the right sources of funding who understand your industry and business model -- all of these get great engagement whether we offer them in blogs, webinars, panels or presentations. Even for experienced entrepreneurs, each startup is new and our breadth of clients means our team may have seen scenarios that they have not yet. Advice? Go with what you know, with what makes you distinctive. - David EhrenbergEarly Growth Financial Services

7. Content That Adds Value And Humor

Everybody is going through something in their lives and most of the time if they see something funny, they will be amused and want to see more of it. Content that includes value and humor will help you gain the respect of a larger audience. Then again, it depends on who your target audience is and what they like. Some audiences may not prefer humor and they just want you to bring them value. You have to identify what your audience wants and focus on user surveys that help you understand them better. Once you do that, you can deliver content that is tailored just for them. When you're building a strategy for your business, it's more important to engage with the audience to find out their needs. You'll win if you can understand the audience and what they want to achieve. - Sweta PatelSilicon Valley Startup Marketing

8. Video Content

We've seen video attract, by far, the most engagement over the past few years. Everyone's time and attention is fragmented these days; people would much rather watch a three-minute video than read text-heavy stories. The great thing about the video is that you don't have to have a degree in media production to create a good clip. If you're just starting out, try filming a few videos on your iPhone and post them to social media -- the more honest and authentic, the better. Earlier this year, I posted a video to LinkedIn about how excited I was about a new product our company was launching, and within minutes I had tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. - Yaniv MasjediNextiva