Content engagement is an important metric to keep an eye on. It tells you how your audience is interacting with your content and helps you understand how interested and involved your audience is with what you’re producing. There are so many different ways to engage with your audience.
In this article, we’re going to take a close look at content engagement.
We’ll look at:
- What content engagement is, and how you can measure it
- The benefits of content engagement, and
- 5 smart ways to increase content engagement.
When we’re done, you’ll have a clearer idea of what content engagement looks like, how to measure it for your own business, and actionable strategies you can put into practice today to boost your engagement numbers!
Let’s get into it.
What Is Content Engagement and How Do You Measure It?
Content engagement is about the interaction your audience has with your content. The likes, shares, comments, and other actions taken as a response to your content.
For example, engagement can look like you hosting a poll on Facebook and getting your audience to participate.
Or posting a TikTok video social media post and receiving likes and social shares.
Engaging content forms a lasting connection with your audience and can help form a long-term relationship.
How Do You Measure Content Engagement?
Tracking engagement is an important part of any sound marketing strategy. It will give you valuable insight into how your audience is interacting with your content.
Measuring your content engagement can be done in a number of ways, like:
- Reviewing social media engagement stats
- Analyzing the user behavior of your target audience
- Tracking your engagement rate across all channels and content format types
- Analyzing Google Analytics metrics like user time spent on page, page views, and engagement metric stats.
Monitor Analytics and Analyze User Behavior
This process is ongoing. You’re reviewing and consistently monitoring these marketing metrics to initially assess performance and subsequently track the changes over time, like:
- Bounce rate
- Time spent on site
Using tools like Google Analytics, you can easily access this information. You can look at the Engagement report they provide to check out average session duration and other stats that can reveal important info about your engagement.
Consider investing in heatmap software, like Hotjar, which can be incredibly helpful. A heatmap works by showing you the hotspots most frequented by your audience.
You can see what part of the webpage users tap, what their scrolling pattern looks like, the most often places users touch, etc.
Here are some examples of what a heatmap looks like:
You can see the actual touchpoints your user is pressing when navigating through the site.
What are you learning from this?
You’re getting to know what your audience likes, what content they gravitate toward, how effective your navigation bar placement is, and the overall user-friendliness of the site.
Tracking your engagement metrics will also uncover top performers and identify trouble spots you might want to improve.
Understanding user experience can help you identify the peaks and valleys in your content strategy.
You’ll be better able to improve your content performance, attract potential customers, improve brand awareness, and improve user engagement overall.
Track Engagement Rate and Analyze Metrics Across Multiple Channels
Look at your social channels, email newsletter, blog, company website, etc. Review and track your engagement rate to uncover:
- Top performing channels
- Most and least engaging content types.
What are you learning from this?
You’re learning about where your audience hangs out online.
Where are they coming from?
How are they accessing your content?
This is all super useful information that can help you build out your content strategy and create a truly valuable experience.
For example, if you get the most engagement and views from YouTube, you can use this info to focus your efforts on your YouTube channel to attract more potential customers and viewers.
What Are The Benefits Of Content Engagement?
Content engagement supports a positive user experience. Customers will be able to easily migrate across your website whether they’re conducting research for a buying decision or looking for entertaining and inspiring content to make their day!
- SEO benefits: When you create engaging content evidenced by user behavior, this tells Google that your content is valuable and customers are interacting with it.
- Creating a self-led buyer’s journey: Incorporating content engagement into your content marketing plan can streamline the buyer’s journey. Customers gravitate toward brands that have higher customer engagement.
- Creating an interactive experience: Create opportunities for your audience to interact with your content. Developing interactive content could mean using tools that allow users to write reviews, share their comments or questions, vote, like, follow, or share your content.
- Higher customer attraction and retention rates: According to Sprout Social, 51% of customers say the most memorable brands are those that respond to customers.
Here are 5 smart ways to increase content engagement in your business.
5 Ways To Increase Content Engagement
1. Build Trust
Creating an environment that customers trust is a big part of having strong content engagement.
Be honest, authentic, and forthcoming with customers. This goes a long way in developing your brand loyalty and creating lasting, long relationships with your customers.
2. Offer An Interactive Experience
Interactive experiences are memorable to consumers.
There are many ways to achieve this:
- Use various content formats like video, polls, etc.
- Create a virtual wardrobe or virtual try-on experience, like trying on glasses on a self-uploaded selfie picture
- Personalized experiences, like sharing browsing history and making recommendations based on previous browsing or purchase history
- Social sharing, giving users a chance to share your content with their friends/family through site social sharing tools you provide
3. Optimize Your Content
Optimizing your content is about learning from your user’s experience and current level of engagement to improve engagement.
- Review your website analytics and customer metrics to measure content engagement
- Focus on producing high-quality, relevant, and well-researched content that your audience is interested in
- Use storytelling to paint the picture and keep your audience laser-focused on your story
- Incorporate interactive features like polls, quizzes, and other tools to keep your audience entertained and engaged
- Experiment, and don’t be afraid to try new things to see what works
Formatting Tips
The formatting of your content plays an important role in how engaging your content is. Here are some tips to help you format your content for engagement:
- Creating an interactive experience: Create opportunities for your audience to interact with your content. Developing interactive content could mean using tools that allow users to write reviews, share their comments or questions, vote, like, follow, or share your content.
- Use video: Cater to the different ways your audience consumes content, including text-based and video content.
- Use bulleted and numbered lists: This improves readability and can lead to increased time on page.
- Include visuals: Engaging visuals like screenshots, infographics, and other visual content can help break up the text and make complex topics easier to understand.
Ultimately, by using these strategies, you can be on your way to boosting your engagement numbers and offering a more valuable digital content experience.
4. Create High-Quality, Valuable Content
Focus on your content quality, whether it be social media content, website content, newsletter, etc.
Examples of interactive content that keeps your audience engaged include:
- Polls: Ask your audience about their opinion. Encourage them to participate in a poll, which will force them to think about your company and how they use it in their daily lives.
- Quizzes: Get your audience involved by providing them with a quiz they can participate in.
- User-generated content (UGC): This is user-created content not created by your marketing department. It can include reviews, video reviews, and other kinds of UGC.
- Case studies: Document a case study and share the results. Include before and after statistics, images, and videos to reveal a behind-the-scenes look at your experiment and how you conducted it.
5. Use Sales Funnels
Sales funnels may be one of the untapped marketing tools preventing you from providing the best user experience possible.
A sales funnel generally has 5 stages:
- Awareness: Educate your audience about who you are and what you do. Capture your audience’s attention through SEO, social media, etc.
- Interest: Gauge your audience’s interest and encourage them to explore it further.
- Consideration: In this stage, your user is considering your product. Build desire, engage, and rapidly respond to questions, inquiries, etc.
- Intent: There’s a clear intent to purchase. The customer may sign up for a free trial or get a quote in this step.
- Purchase: Your customer buys your product or service.
Through each step in the funnel, you have an opportunity to engage with your user. Use this opportunity to create brand awareness and ultimately, hopefully reach the final stage in the funnel: purchase.
Here’s a marketing funnel template you can use to help you create a successful sales funnel.
Bottom Line
At the end of the day, content matters. Creating engaging content goes a long way in cultivating a loyal, engaged audience that rabidly consumes your content and supports your business.
Now that you know how important content engagement is, you can use the tools and strategies we shared to measure your audience engagement. Then, go on to create your own engagement strategy to reach your content marketing goals.
Have you looked at or measured your content engagement?
How important of a role do you think it plays in your small business?
