Whether you’re an author, blogger, or content writer, creating engaging content gets you ahead of the game.
“But how?” you ask. “How do I write engaging content?”
Great question! We’re going to look over the steps to write engaging content in this article.
Interested in creating engaging content and fuel it up with visuals? Use Venngage to fulfill any graphic design needs for your marketing team, without having to hire a graphic designer. Get started for free.
Table of Contents:
- What is engaging content?
- Why is engaging content important?
- How to create engaging content
- Tips to creating engaging content consistently
- Engaging content ideas
- Interactive content ideas
What is engaging content?
Engaging content is any piece of information that adds value to its readers. In other words, any content that gets the readers hooked, makes them think about something they’ve learned in a different light or provides a new perspective on a topic.
This applies to written online content like blog posts or social media posts, audio content like podcasts, or video content like webinars and more.
Here’s an example of engaging content in the form of written blog posts:
This was written by Nadya Khoja, our previous Chief Growth Officer. What makes this piece interesting and engaging?
She manages to write an introduction that really draws people in by asking relevant questions and injecting humor into her writing:
But besides creating a hook that draws readers, this piece is engaging in the sense that it provides really impactful and useful information to its target audience: marketers who want an SEO ranking strategy that works.
And Nadya manages to make the readers stay and read more by analyzing the strategy she mentioned in the hook (with evidence that it works), as well as tips for marketers to apply:
Of course, she also makes the piece really easy to read by inserting visuals here and there, like this one which shows the process she goes through when searching for new content:
Or this template, which is an example of a guestographic we created (as the post is about guestographics):
If you’re interested in learning more about this particular piece, visit: How to Use Guestographics to Build Links & Increase Your SEO Rankings, Fast
Why is engaging content important?
Once you’ve made your content engaging, there’s a higher chance it will go viral since it draws people in and makes them want to share.
This means that creating engaging content can drive more traffic to your website, increase your brand awareness, get more people to talk about you, and ultimately increase the number of leads or conversions you can get for your product.
We’ve had our share of creating viral content, and some of them really earned us lots of press and brand recognition, such as this one about graphic design trends which has earned a link from Creative Bloq:
Read more: 8 Graphic Design Trends that Will Define 2022 [Infographic]
Plus, if you manage to consistently create engaging content, you can harness a number of followers or subscribers who love to consume your content and even promote it without being asked.
But how can you create content that’s engaging for your target audience?
How to create engaging content
Good content excites, refreshes, and feels conversational. And hard to create, granted. But there are ways you can do to get yourself prepped and ready to create engaging content.
- The first step is to get inspired. There are many good sources of inspiration. Search a topic you’d like to read and check out your favorite author’s content.
- Read up on the latest trending news and write them down in your own words. Doing this helps you write them uniquely and with your own writing voice.
- Share your thoughts on different topics that interest you. Then, take note of what people find interesting or useful about it.
- Research which content gets the most shares in a particular niche.
- Watch videos, read articles, listen to podcasts, check content writing samples, and ask yourself how you could share the same ideas but make them even better. For instance, if there is a video about “Why this 2016 Kia Rio is the best car,” then I would think about “What is the best car in 2017?” You don’t have to think about a whole new topic because you can update the existing one.
- Then make sure all ideas fit together nicely by checking if there are any recurring themes and eliminating duplicates.
Now that we’ve got the steps out, the most challenging part of writing is consistently publishing high-quality content. Let’s read more about it in the next section.
7 tips to creating engaging content consistently
Good content takes time to produce, but it’s not easy to keep pushing out high-quality hits that have the potential to turn viral and add value to it simultaneously. Here’s how you can keep making fresh, entertaining, and valuable content:
- Determine your purpose
- Be consistent
- Do your research
- Create content abundant with visuals
- Stand out from all other blogs
- Make yourself an authority
- Learn from what doesn’t work
Determine your purpose
Everything you publish should be because you’re reaching out to connect with your target audience, and the content is designed to help them do something. What are you trying to accomplish? You want your content to drive engagement, but what’s the ultimate goal? Attract potential customers? Drive conversions? It will help if you know what it is before creating the post.
For example, we created this Game of Thrones infographic blog post with the aim to gain press and mentions, instead of driving conversions:
However, we still created several infographic templates that are easy to customize (like the one above), so those interested in designing their own infographic (relevant to Game of Thrones or not) still have some templates to work off of.
Unfortunately, there isn’t just one formula that will guarantee a share or reaction from everyone who reads your post. But keeping things simple can never hurt, so try pitching related articles about topics that are urgent and relevant issues in your industry, or topics that are trending.
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Be consistent
It won’t be hard for you to pump out well-written content that drives engagement, as long as you’re diligent enough with your task. Stop thinking of it as something done just once now and then, like once a week. Instead, write on a daily basis.
Always give people more than they expect from whichever angle you choose. Give out great deals and offers too so that the audience sees how reliable and generous you are.
For example, instead of just going through the steps and cuts the post at that, our post on how to summarize long-form content for an infographic actually guides the audience through summarizing a piece of writing like this:
to make it into a proper infographic, like this:
If you’re having a hard time, just remember that it will take a lot of practice before you can produce content regularly. Commit to the idea that you’ll have half-finished posts sitting there until you’re done with them, regardless of how long it takes.
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Do your research
Writing an article and putting up all sorts of information in one place sure sounds like a good thing, but people won’t find anything when what they’re looking for isn’t included in the piece.
A great way to know what information to put into your blog post or social media update is by diving deep into the topic at hand. Doing this involves online searches, reading books about it, and talking to authorities in the field.
If you’re not sure what exactly your audience wants, ask for it! Run a poll on Twitter or send out a survey through email. Even if they don’t know exactly what they want, asking them will help you find things that will interest them. Do this before you write so that you can target your readers better.
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Create content abundant with visuals
As you can see from this post or from any other posts on our site, we rely heavily on visuals to make our content engaging, easy to skim and easy to understand.
This is because visuals can help people remember and recall ideas, according to research.
Plus, think of your own experience. Do you prefer reading a post that’s just a huge block of text from beginning to the end, or do you prefer one that has different images, GIFs or even memes to break up the text and visualize the hard-to-understand concepts?
This is the reason why we’ve used slide decks and simple data visualizations to make vaccine information easy to understand:
And why we’ve used infographics and data visualizations to make big numbers easy to get, like this:
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Stand out from all other blogs
You might be one of the many content creators whom viewers turn to for content about the same topic. But are there elements that make your blog different from others? Does it have some special tidbits that others don’t include? If yes, let people know by putting these things into your posts because knowing how particular you are will make people more compelled to come back for more.
People love personal stories. This post on how to increase blog traffic from Nadya does well since she describes the process she actually goes through to create high-converting, well-written blog posts.
She also has a very distinctive writing style that’s hard to mimic and makes her posts stand out (and engaging):
This is also one of the reasons why case studies work so well. The main focus of case studies is the customer who has had some wins by using your product, and by walking your target audience through your already-successful-yet-really-relevant customers, you have a higher chance to convert them.
We’ve applied that lesson to our content marketing strategy. Venngage success stories even have some very pretty infographics to make it easier for people to scan:
If you’re interested in seeing more case study examples or learn how to write a case study, visit these posts:
- How to Write a Case Study [+ Design Tips]
- 15+ Professional Case Study Examples [Design Tips + Templates]
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Make yourself an authority
What makes you the go-to expert worth following on social media? If you’re willing to put in some time and effort to help people out, you can be one!
The key is to always be helpful to your audience through comments, a blog post, or even by sending them suggestions through chat.
Another thing that will always help make you an authority in the community is doing something original, like creating original content.
Original content with lots of data often attracts a ton of press and earns lots of backlinks from other websites, which is one of the reasons why reputable sites regularly produce trends reports, market reports, etc.
We’ve applied this lesson to our content marketing strategies and produced this piece on visual content marketing statistics:
In addition to this, we also create content related to COVID-19 and vaccination, since it’s a topic multiple people care about. Here’s an example of that: an infographic about barriers to COVID-19 vaccination:
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Learn from what doesn’t work
Like anything else in life, content production succeeds more often than it fails. But this doesn’t mean that we should stop learning from our past mistakes. If something doesn’t work and nobody is interested, just learn from the experience by reflecting on what could have been done differently. Most of the time, you’ll find out that just one particular thing was missing out from all the other elements present.
Engaging content ideas
Here’s a list of some great ideas to generate engaging content.
SEO
A very popular topic among website owners, bloggers, and marketers. And what’s more engaging than explaining the nitty-gritty of on-page optimization and increasing your page views?
Examples:
- How to Use Mini Infographics to Improve On-Page SEO
- How to Use SEO Data to Fuel Your Content Marketing Strategy
- How We Scaled Worldable’s SEO Content Strategy and Increased Organic Traffic by 86%
How-to articles
These are always great if you can make them really detailed and truly useful for your readers. If you have full confidence you know everything about a certain topic, chances are that many visitors will be interested in learning from you as well!
Examples:
- How to Improve Employee Engagement with Visuals
- What is a Marketing Plan and How to Make One?
- How to Create a Brand Style Guide (With Lessons from Top Tech Companies)
Lists
Fast readers will always love lists. They’re quick to read and very helpful at the same time.
Examples:
- 120+ Best Presentation Ideas, Design Tips & Examples
- 11 Types of Charts and How Businesses Use Them
- 20+ Checklist Infographic Templates for Workplace Safety, Health, Social Media Promotion and More
Interactive content ideas
Here’s a list of some interactive content ideas to generate engaging content.
- Create Quizzes: Quizzes are a fun and engaging way to interact with your audience. Create a quiz to increase engagement and make your content more enjoyable to consume.
- Text-based games. Give them instructions and see whether or not they follow them. You could even pit two “characters” against each other and have users decide whom they side with.
- Useful widgets. Give people a widget that allows them to input their thoughts and opinions about your company or let them enter their contact information in an interactive map so they can easily see where everyone else is from.
- Make polls/surveys. Create a poll or survey that allows people to vote on different product ideas, like proposed new items on your menu.
In conclusion: Engaging content is never hard to create with these tips
Apply these tips and best practices to your content creation process and you’ll be able to create great content that increases engagement, drives conversions, connects you with your audience and builds subscriptions.
Interested in adding visuals to your content? Start by creating a free Venngage account, and explore our hundreds of professionally designed infographics, presentations, reports, plans and more.