You Ask, I Answer: Driving Engagement with Content?

In today's episode, Erica asks, What drives a reader to engage with a piece of content? Well, I guess a bunch of things to unpack here. First, what do you define as engagement? Is it somebody uh sharing it? Is somebody commenting on it?

Is it somebody returning to it over and over again? Uh, first you need to figure out what that looks like when it comes to uh the content where it lives natively and where it goes. So, for example, social networks, it does go in someone's email. Um, there are a number of uh straightforward, easy use tools uh that you can put on your website that will allow you to not only enable sharing, you know, those little sharing widgets and buttons, but then also put some tracking on it as well to track the different types of uh engagements you can get out of people. So keep that in mind.

Engagement though, getting somebody to do something is all about one word, and that word is emotion. Um something in your content has to trigger an emotion, provoke an emotional reaction in somebody to get them to do anything, convert, engage, uh share. Uh the content has to get somebody to feel something strongly enough that they're willing to do something about it. So give some thought already to what content engages you, right? When you're on LinkedIn or Twitter or YouTube or Facebook, what do you do on those networks?

And then pay some attention to what gets you engaged. There are uh any number of uh algorithms out there on these different networks, uh, Facebook most prominently, who um are optimizing for engagement, and they are optimizing for engagement based on emotion. Consider the topics that are shown to you in your newsfeed, right? And how they make you feel. Now, you may not want those emotions um to be associated with your brand.

Certainly uh we have seen plenty of examples where um those types of engagements um leave a an emotional aftertaste to your brand, right? So if your brand is really good at making people angry, that's not necessarily a good thing. You'll get that engagement, but you may not get the business that's supposed to follow from it. So that's another uh key point, but it is fairly obvious when you look at the state of discourse, when you look at the state of what people share and how they share it and how they react to it, that the emotions that certainly get the engagement you're looking for most easily are those that are negative. So a big part then is you have to decide what emotions your brand stands for and wants to provoke in somebody, and then how do you build content around that emotion?

What content creates that emotion in you? This is not something you can automate easily. You can certainly do the analytics on that emotion and the complexities of it, but at the end of the day, you're gonna have to do a lot of qualitative work, a lot of qualitative research. Uh, asking people uh to send you examples. Uh let's say your uh chosen emotion is security, right?

This is uh content that makes you feel secure. So not only does it have uh an element of happiness to it, but it has a complete absence of fear, um, or it has fear that is presented initially and then remediated. Um you need to ask people, can you send me content that does that for you and send it to uh a representative group of people that represents the the kinds of customers you want, and commission essentially a a research study, and ask people send me content that makes you feel secure, it makes you feel more secure, makes you feel better about uh your safety or your security or whatever uh the emotion is you're going after, and then you have to read all of it, consume it, look for similarities that help you identify okay, these are the kinds of things, structures, certain types of language, certain types of sentences, imagery, um, certain types of adjectives and adverbs, um, certain uh topics and the way they're presented, and build yourself a codex of this is the type of content that is associated with the feeling of security, so that um you can mimic some of that and incorporate some of that into the content you're building. Now that is a fairly lengthy process, but it's an important one that if you want to provoke that emotion in people, um, that's what you need to do. The same as if you were trying to provoke I don't know, uh what wrath or lust or sloth or any of the the cardinal sins um or any of the the cardinal virtues, what what kinds of content invoke uh honor or um piety or any of these these more complex emotions?

Remember that you don't have to stick to a base emotion, you don't have to you know pick anger or happiness or sadness. You can uh there are palettes of emotion that are composed of you know the the base emotions in varying proportions, and that that is something that you can do some level of quantification on. It's not exact. Um there's still a lot of room for improvement in the natural language processing tools available on the market to do that kind of analysis, but at least it can point you directionally, like hey, I'm gonna write this piece um uh on on supposed to make people feel happy, and you run it through one of these scoring tools and it says, huh? Looks like you're written mostly about anger.

Like, whoops. Um that is what you can do to get people to engage with your content is write it with the a target emotion in mind after you've done your market research, and then uh use various natural language processing tools to let you know if you're you're on the right track or not. And then of course you measure it, right? Does content that you put together uh with this new emotional focus, does it perform better or worse uh than your existing content? You're doing you know uh essentially like a uh a clinical trial almost.

Um you're you're gonna be A B testing emotional content versus non-emotional content to see how it performs. So, really good question. Um emotions are tricky because everybody's an individual and everybody's emotions are different, and there are common grounds, but there are also just as many exceptions to the rule. So it's one of the reasons why it is really important to get a representative sample when you're doing your market research so that it's not people exactly like you unless all of your customers are exactly like you. Uh and if that's the case, then you know that would be the the sample you'd want to take.

If you have follow-up questions on this topic, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.