By Lydia Barley
43% of people said that the primary reason they unfollowed a company/brand on social media is because they post irrelevant or unappealing content. Alarming, right? This statistic shows the importance of ensuring that your content is both relevant and appealing for your audience as opposed to just smashing out as much content as possible. While taking the time to generate content for your audience is great, that time is wasted if your audience feels as though the content is irrelevant or unappealing. So, how can you ensure that your content is relevant and appealing? Well, in this blog we have gathered a list of tips to help, so keep on reading.
1. Know your audience
When your content falls flat this is usually because it’s not what the audience was looking for, hence why it’s important to understand who you’re delivering your content to and why. If you post content based on a topic that your audience has no interest in they will not bother to engage with it. Knowing what your audiences’ interests are will allow you to create content for them that they will be interested in and will engage with.
How you can get to know your audience
- Look at your Analytics on the platform that you are using – These analytics will provide you with an insight into the demographics of your audience. Some platforms have an analytics feature built in, such as Instagram, which allows business account users to see the ages, genders and locations of their audience. In addition to built in analytics features there are a range of other sites that will allow you to analyse your analytics and audience demographics (such as Hootsuite).
- Take the time to engage with your audience and get to know them – This will not only build relationships with your audience, but it will provide you with an insight into their interests and the type of people that they are.
Pictured: Hootsuite Analytics – Facebook Insights
2. Answer questions that your audience has
Answering questions that your audience has and are seeking answers to is a sure way to ensure that your content is relevant to them.
How to know what questions your audience has
- Ask them – There’s no simpler way to find out what questions your audience has then to just ask them. You can ask them directly face to face or via a social media post, an email, a phone call, a poll or a questionnaire.
- Visit Q&A platforms – Visit popular Q&A platforms (such as Quora) and see what people are asking about in your industry.
- Read your comments, engage with your audience and look what’s up on social media about your industry – More commonly than not, you’ll stumble across some relevant questions that your audience are seeking answers for.
- Use platforms that have a question finder feature – There are a range of different platforms that have question finder features, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush. These platforms will provide you with a list of questions relevant to your selected keyword.
3. Make your content visually appealing
Making your content visually appealing is extremely important for attracting, maintaining and generating engagement from readers. Making your content more visually appealing makes it seem more interesting and easier to digest. If people think your content is too hard to digest they’ll just leave.
How to make content visually appealing
- Write shorter sentences – Shorter sentences make your content easier to digest.
- Organize your content into shorter paragraphs – Organizing your content into visually recognizable chunks also makes it easier for readers to digest. Larger chunks are harder to skim and are harder to follow.
- Use subheadings– Using subheadings further organizes your content into chunks and makes it easier for ‘skimmers’ to understand what your content is about.
- Use dot points – Breaking up your text into dot points works similarly to organizing your content into shorter paragraphs, making it easier to digest.
- Use charts, graphs and infographics –charts, graphs and infographics can break up your content and make it easier to read, some people are also visual learners who remember and digest content easier when it’s visually demonstrated.
- Use images– Not only can images break up content and make it easier to read, relevant images can add to the experience also. Quicksprout actually found that content with relevant images get 94% more views than content without images.
Pictured: Blog post How to Get Online Reviews and Manage Negative (or Fake!) Reviews
So in summary, ensuring that your content is appealing and relevant to your audience is crucial for your content marketing success. Particularly as audiences today don’t just desire relevant, appealing and engaging content, they expect it. By now you should recognise that this can be achieved by simply knowing your audience, answering questions that your audience has and creating visually appealing content.
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