Content is king

By Michelle Clark

So why is it so important to create and develop engaging content? The big answer is attention. Think for a moment about how you read blog posts or view videos. If, 30 seconds in, your eyes have glazed over and you’ve begun thinking about something totally unrelated to the content’s subject matter, what’s the likelihood that you’ll remember anything about the blog post you read or the video you just watched? Not very good right? Therefore it is important to create engaging content in order to keep the attention and interest of your target audience otherwise what’s the point?

The next big question then is what is engaging content? According to CMI engaging content has four qualities: it’s relevant, it’s unique, it’s entertaining and/or educational, and it tells a story. Engaging content means different things to different people and there is no one definition but the underlying ideas are all the same. The next important question then to ask is what does your target audience perceive as engaging content? The key to creating engaging content is beginning with the customer and their needs. Before you can create amazing content you need to understand what your customers and prospects pressuring problems are. In addressing their problems you can create content and solutions that are engaging for your target audience.

Here are some ideas to help in updating and tweaking content to keep your target audience engaged and interacting…

• Talk to your customers (or at least to the people in your company who do) and find out what’s most important to them.
• Audit your competitor’s sites and blogs on a regular basis to see what kinds of content they’re creating and about what topics.
• Set up Google alerts or sign up for RSS feeds using a content aggregation platform like Google Reader. These types of tools will allow you to gather huge amounts of “intelligence” in one place that you can quickly sort through to identify trends and hot topics.
• Monitor the discussions going on about your industry over social media such as in LinkedIn Groups and on Twitter.
• Check out the agendas of relevant conferences to see what topics people are discussing.

The payoff of doing these things is that it positions you to create content that your target audience is going to care about.