10 Effective Tips To Engage Your Audience Through Writing

This article covers Basic tips you need to understand when writing content for consumption online, whether you are a business, an entrepreneur or just a random individual creating written content online.

TIP 1: Know Your Target Audience

You would notice \’knowing your audience\’ was also specified in our previous post – Article Writing and Content Creation … Well, this is because knowing your audience is a key factor (but not limited to) in writing, marketing, and advertising. Knowing your audience is central to any strategy, so how do you get to know them?

Five (5) ways 

• Do your research: You need to do market research to ensure the demographics you\’ve selected are the right ones for your brand, products and or services. This will help you think like your audience (Persona) as well as determine where and how to find their location.

• Get their attention: Having known your audience, their likes, and location. Now, it\’s time to get their attention with content they are most likely to love and be interested in. Creating catchy, funny or interesting titles should be the first means to consider then further down to the main article.

• Look at your competitors: (Especially those getting results in the field) Evaluate their brand, communication, and marketing strategy. Analyze to identify their strengths and workout out how best to leverage these tactics whilst still realizing more unique strategies to make your content stand out.

• Get feedback: Don\’t just write always, make your content more engaging by encouraging your audience to give feedback.

TIP 2: Look at Your Competitors 

(Especially those getting results in the field) Evaluate their brand, communication, and marketing strategy. Analyze to identify their strengths and workout out how best to leverage these tactics whilst still realizing more unique strategies to make your content stand out.

TIP 3: Pop-Up Questions

One unique way of getting your audience engaged is to make them pounder on things. If you take a close look at (TIP 1) in the first paragraph, you would notice a question at the end of the paragraph. Other great questions could be (what do you think?, How, why, etc).

TIP 4: Monitor Comment and Engagements

This is particularly important as one of your goals should be to pay close attention to people responding to your content, how they are responding, and how often they respond. The more engagements received (comments, likes, and shares), the better your work gets; this information, if discovered, can be used to discover what content your audience values more.

TIP 5: Be Vivid

Paint a picture of your audience\’s mind. Using a lot of metaphors can help your writing become more detailed. This way, when you tell a story, it can be portrayed exactly how you want it to be. Aim to always add some vividness even if they aren\’t telling a story. (source: hdwebpros)

TIP 6: Use Call-To-Action(CTO); Reduce Persuasion

Writing to get your audience to do or react to things can be tactical and as such requires a great strategy. You don\’t shove your opinion down the readers\’ throat because no one likes being told what to do, rather people are best motivated when they come to the decision or realization themselves to follow a new course. Call-To-Action could be used where the need is e.g could be a banner, button, graphics or text prompting readers to act or click and continue down a conversion funnel.

TIP 7: Writing To Learn Not Just To Communicate

When you write with your audience in mind, you work hard to use properly selected phrases, not only to keep your readers reading but at the same time perfect your skill and sense of approach. The more you write, the more you tend to learn about your audience persona and the better you become in driving and communicating your message to the readers. 

TIP 8: Think About What You Need Them to Know

While it is absolutely critical that you adjust your messages and means of communication to your audience, that does not mean you should lose sight of what you need them to know; remember the core aims of the content being written and make sure they are effectively being incorporated into your communication. While simultaneously packing them in a way that will best meet your readers\’ expectations.

TIP 9: Proofread and Edit Your Draft

This is the final stage of the editing process in writing; it involves focusing on surface errors such as misspellings and mistakes in grammar, punctuation etc. This process should be carried out only after writing and all other revisions.

A proactive editor (see: Grammarly editor) can be used, making changes and suggestions that will improve the overall quality of your writing. See points to consider in our previous post

TIP 10: Know Yourself and Tell What You Stand For

This tends to be less regarded because of course, you know your business\’s personality/core values already. But where you may default is when you fail to tell why you do what you do. Definitely, every business has its own motivations, which we believe will strengthen the customer-brand connection if told.

Ever thought of why people buy Coca-Cola more often? … well, this is not because they think the physical product is better than their opponent; but because they like the motivation behind the production.

See related post:

• Article writing and content creation