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In this era of trying to do the bare necessities well – all you can ask of a human a year into a pandemic – it serves us content folks to emphasize quality over quantity.
Quality, in the world of white papers and blogs and videos, is about engagement. You want people to read your thing! Click on it! Share it! Develop a view that your people say smart and useful stuff!
Quality, not quantity. Content that engages MORE people, rather than making MORE content. It’s time to outdo yourself!
So how can you ratchet up the engagement factor on your content? Here’s your super-short checklist.
Our first priority as content makers is to make relevant pieces. This is harder than it sounds. The marketing team is often stuck pushing out whatever is available to them – what’s the product team trying to sell? What are the subject matter experts willing to write or talk about? – and that’s not always a match for what the target audience wants and what your content engine is aiming to provide.
Fortunately, you can usually take what’s available to you and use the relevance test to figure out the right angle. Blogging Wizard shares a really good, simple exercise to test for relevance:
First, fill in this sentence: Our content helps ________ who ___________.
For instance:
Our content helps everyday savers who need help understanding the choices of their retirement program.
Our content helps institutional consultants who want to be informed about new ideas so they can filter the best ones through to clients.
Our content helps wealthy families who want to know what is happening today or will happen next in the markets.
Post this sentence on the wall over your computer. Then look again at the topic or subject in your available pipeline – you need to do some magic to approach that topic or subject in a way that meets the two parts of your relevance test. Now it’s not “Here’s how great our multi-asset product is.” It’s “Here are the three ways that pension funds are using multi-asset products to diversify tail risk.”
Look how fun these guys are:
The ochre corduroys! The wide ties! The mustached smile!
These are Intel founders way back in the day – some humans behind the teeny weeny microchips.
Here’s test number two for better content: are there any signs of humans?
Vintage mustaches are one (excellent) way to bring humans in. But storytelling is another solid route. As this post from Social Media Today points out, “Storytelling could include sharing stories from people involved in creating or producing your products or services.”
You have humans! How did they get the ideas for their new investment strategy? What lessons did they learn about investing from their own families? What team member do they look to for advice? How about screenshots of their WFH setups or a roundup of company dogs?
Want more storytelling tips? Revisit the tale of what I learned from the 2-inch ruler that came home with my preschooler one day.
People go to the internet with questions, and good content gives them answers. Really good content – well-researched long-form stuff – is much more likely to be backlinked and boost SEO compared to shorter stuff.
But wait, you’re thinking. That sounds like quantity. Didn’t you say quality?
You’re right, I did. However, you can compile shorter-form pieces on a single theme to give a long-form look at a topic. Three-part series, for example, are a great way to explore a theme and produce both short-form pieces for multiple promotions and compile into a long-form all-about piece to drive more backlinks and deeper engagement.
Super-blogger Neil Patel has a good rule of thumb for getting higher engagement – you gotta make it easy. He gives five dimensions of ease, but the first is that content has to be:
Easy to scan.
People aren’t going to read your white paper. You aren’t reading this post. You’re scanning. But that’s okay!
If it’s interesting AND scannable, you’ll track all the way down to here with me. (Hi! I’m glad you’re here!)
Incidentally, scannability has a lot in common with Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream. All of us marketers should take heed of Ben and Jerry’s wildly successful formula for making ice cream that we can’t stop eating. Spoiler alert: like the chocolate chunks that tempt us to take one more spoonful, scannable content chunks tempt your audience to hang with you longer.
Most marketing directors want to get more from their investment in content. Higher engagement is the leverage that drives value up.
Use this checklist throughout your content creation and promotion process to keep circling back to this core goal – to make your efforts more engaging.
Looking for an experienced freelance financial writer to help with engaging content? Reach out and let’s talk about your project needs.
Posted By
Carolyn
Categories
Compound Return Newsletter, Content Marketing, Freelance financial writer