How To Create Engaging Content For Your Blog

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Every business has realized the power of content marketing. With a great content marketing strategy, you can engage your audience, build a community, and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. That’s why blogging has become so common.

Unfortunately, this also means that there are too many blogs competing for the same audience and a few slots on the search engine results pages. So, how exactly can you stand out and make sure your blogging efforts generate meaningful ROI? 

Well, you must create engaging content that captures and retains your audience’s attention. 

In this article, we’ll look at six ways you can achieve that. Let’s jump right in.

6 Ways To Create Engaging Content For Your Blog

Here are some tips to create engaging content for your blogs. By following these tips, you will be able to recreate the success of great marketers.

1. Learn About Your Audience First

To write engaging content, you have to know about your customers first. You need to know what kinds of things speak to them and what will hold their attention. 

For that, you need to do some detailed research to create a customer persona

Here is what you need to find out about your audience in a B2B scenario.

  • The size of the company
  • The Decision-makers
  • Approximate geographical location
  • Their “needs” rather than “wants”
  • A good idea of whether your product/service is feasible for them or not.

This information is required for you to create engaging content for your audience. 

In contrast to B2C marketing, B2B marketing requires that you understand the needs of your customers rather than their wants. A single person may impulsively buy something they ”want”. However, a team will always put the company first and only buy what it “needs” to grow and prosper.

You can do the following to gather this information.

  • Communicate with your sales team, they usually have good information about your existing customers. 
  • Look at your existing customers to see what worked with them.
  • Send surveys to potential customers
  • Analyze existing market research
  • This data can also be obtained through your CRM or a third-party audience research tool such as Sparktoro. 

Here is an example showing how much data they can provide.

Since the B2B sales process tends to involve multiple decision-makers, you may need to create multiple personas. For example, you can have one persona for the champion and another for the ultimate decision-maker. This makes it easier to create the right content that will speak to each stakeholder involved in the buying process.

2. Be Unique And Original

Your blog must host unique and original content for you to generate and convert leads successfully. Unique content drives engagement because of two major advantages.

  • Google and other search engines prefer unique content, so they rank it higher in the SERPs
  • Your audience also prefers unique content because they don’t want to see old and reused information over and over again.

So, when you write articles for your marketing blog, you want to make sure that the content is as unique as it can be. 

How can you write unique and original content? Here are some actionable steps for you to follow.

  • Google the topic you want to write on. See what other kinds of stuff have been written on it. You want to know what you have to avoid to keep your content original.
  • Gather background information on your topic. You need to have a great understanding of your blog topic because that adds authority, which helps with the conversion of leads.
  • Brush up on your writing and paraphrasing skills because, inevitably, you will need to use some content from other sources. To differentiate your article from others, you will need to significantly change the wording of the work. 

That last part is not mandatory because you can do that with the help of online tools. If you have to use some content from another source, try to paraphrase it with the help of tools like Paraphrase Online. Paraphrase Online is a freemium paraphrasing tool that uses AI and specifically NLP (Natural Language Processing) to manipulate text. 

Also, don’t forget to bring your own expertise to the topic. You can share your own insights from first-hand experiences to make your content unique and original. 

3. Write Actionable Content

Blogs are a sort of service. Your company is trying to educate your audience about its products and services via blogging. 

As such the content creation process requires some thought and care. The number one requirement is that the content must be useful and actionable. 

If the information provided in the article is not actionable, it is of no use to the people. As such the engaging factor lessens by a lot and makes your blog less appealing. 

That does not help with conversions and your overall digital marketing efforts. Copywriting techniques for interesting phraseology can only take you so far.

If you have noticed, even in this article, we are providing you with information that you can act on to make your blog flourish. If we didn’t, you would have no reason to be here. So, make sure that you offer practical advice through your blog posts.

4. Use Images And Other Visual Elements

Adding multimedia to your blog posts is one of the best ways to drive user engagement. Think about it; how would you feel if you landed on an article and scrolled through it only to find that it is full of nothing but text? You’ll have a hard time motivating yourself to read through it, right?

Therefore, make sure to add images, animations, and videos to your blog posts. This is especially important in the B2B setting where long-form content is the order of the day. 

Ensure that you don’t go more than 300 words in an article without adding an image. This will make your content more inviting to the eye thus boosting retention and user engagement.

Now, it’s not just about adding visuals. You want to include visuals that add value to your content. This is why using stock images is not a good idea. Instead, use screenshots, charts, etc., to demonstrate the points you’re making in the content. That’s what we’ve done in this article—you’ll notice that every visual has been used strategically.

Also, remember that Google ranks images for search. By adding images relevant to the content, you open your blog for more high-intent organic traffic through image search. 

5. Write Catchy Headlines

Catchy headlines are the bread and butter of internet marketing. Without a catchy headline, you cannot attract any audience to begin with. In digital marketing and content marketing, the headings need to have an impact. 

The more impactful the heading, the higher the chances of people reading through your articles. 

So, if you want to earn your place in your audience’s favorite marketing blogs, you should start optimizing your headlines. 

Here are different ways to optimize your headlines.

  • Include your main keyword in the heading. This keyword is typically linked to customer queries.
  • Pose your heading as a question
  • Add numbers in the heading if possible. Numbers tend to stand out compared to words.
  • Relate the headline to your audience’s pain point
  • Try to evoke some kind of emotion through the headings.

Here is an example of a catchy headline from HubSpot.

Besides including a number (7 Insights) and making a clear value proposition (insights for thriving as a creator), the headline also features some social proof with “straight from the Experts.”

That said, it’s advisable to experiment with different headline formulas and formats to see what works best for your target audience. You can also play around with different headline generators.

6. Write Hooks In Your Introductions

One thing you need to know about writing a marketing blog is that your hook game must be on point. It is no use having helpful content if you cannot hook your readers first. A nice introduction hooks an audience and compels them to read the content. 

Here are some of the ways you can write engaging introductions.

  • Add some startling or shocking statistic in your opening paragraph
  • Write a thought-provoking question
  • Instantly start addressing the customer’s pain point
  • Use humor
  • Try to tell a story
  • Make it relatable by sharing something from your experience

But no matter what you do, keep it short and you will quickly find that your marketing blog has become your audience’s favorite blog.

Check this out:

Aura is a great example of a site that uses hooks in the introduction. They consistently use story-led introductions, like the one above, to lead into the article.

7. Use A Conversational Tone 

Your audience wants content that makes them feel as if they are being spoken to at an individual level, not as a generic group. When you provide such content, you will foster an online community that sticks with your brand for the long haul.

A conversational tone has the following properties:

  • Addresses the reader directly with words like “you” and “your”
  • Limited to no use of jargon
  • Lots of contractions, like “can’t” instead of “cannot”
  • use of simple language

A conversational tone will boost engagement by keeping readers hooked to your content. This will have several secondary effects. 

For example, it’ll boost your performance on the search engine results pages. When users stay longer on your website and browse through multiple pages, it signals to search engines that users are finding your site helpful. This may push you higher up the SERPs as a result.

Additionally, the tone and increased engagement can result in more conversions. As users engage with more of your content, it becomes clear to them what your brand has to offer. That means they’re more likely to take the desired action. 

8. Format The Blog Content for Easy Scanning

You may already know how SEO tools like Surfer, great copywriting, and knowledge of industry trends can help digital marketers create a popular blog. But did you know that something as simple as formatting has a huge effect on blog engagement? 

Formatting refers to the way the information is arranged and presented in blog posts. Poor formatting can bury even the most insightful content. 

The reason is that poor formatting makes it hard to read, so even if you have insightful takeaways in your blog post, people won’t find them because your content is too difficult to read. 

To make the most of formatting try to arrange your content in a way that is easy to skim. Here’s how you can do that.

  • Use headings and subheadings to distinguish between subtopics.
  • Use bullet points whenever you have to list something.
  • Another good content marketing strategy is to use short paragraphs, typically three to five lines long.
  • Employ your copywriting skills to write great excerpts and put them in callout boxes to bring attention to important points and feature announcements quickly.

You will find that this article uses most of these points. All listings are in bullet points, there are multiple headings and subheadings, and all the paragraphs are short. 

Conclusion

You can do several things to make your marketing blog posts more engaging. In this article, we discussed eight tips that can help you do just that.

Some of these tips are all but mandatory, and others you can choose to apply later. But they will all help you create highly engaging content for your blog.

The mandatory tips are to learn about your audience and find their interests and demographics. Then, create content that appeals to them. Your content must always be unique with actionable advice. 

Otherwise, people will think it’s useless. Catchy headlines and images paired with good formatting will also add a lot of attractiveness to the content. 

So, there you have it. Use these tips and make your marketing efforts successful.

About the author

Nicholas Prins

I'm the founder of Launch Space. We work with global companies helping them scale lead generation through SEO and content marketing. Head over to the homepage to find out more.

By Nicholas Prins