Why Content Engagement is Key To Your Content Marketing + Equation
5.00/5Nowadays, most businesses around the world are run using online platforms. They require a strong, effective content plan to grab the attention and create content engagement.
Content marketing is one of the best strategies in regards to attracting visitors to these platforms. However, you need to keep a watchful eye on its results. To analyze these results, you need to be able to measure them. That’s where content engagement tools come in.
Content engagement is how your users and visitors react to and interact with your blog posts. And it’s possible to measure it in many ways.
Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is a broad term. Simply put, it means focusing on creating and publishing content for your target audience. Of course, there are many ways to reach your audience, but this has proved to be one of the best marketing strategies.
This particular strategy is praised for its ability to drive sales, provide important information to the customers, and greatly expand the audience by attracting attention.
It includes memes and gifs, blogs and posts on your website or social platform, newsletters, webinars, and so on. As a famous saying suggests, content is king. Creative content is what attracts the eyes of visitors. Thus, it requires consistency as it’s based on continuous sharing of valuable content for free.
Remember that many businesses now turn to content marketing agencies to help them with their content marketing strategy to make sure they target the right audiences with the right kind of content and the right time.
Engaging Content
One might think all it takes is to create lots of content. While in truth, simply publishing a blog post is never enough. About 7 million new blog posts appear around the globe each day. Only on WordPress, there are more than 50 million blogs.
With this large amount of publications, you need something unique for your content to stand out. Without a proper plan and content strategy, everything you create will be lost in this ocean of information.
First of all, you need to make sure you know your audience well. Who are you trying to reach? What would they like? What would catch their eye? Your content needs to be relevant to the audience you attempt to reach. You should also pay attention to what creates engagement and what doesn’t.
For example, interactive content is more likely to stand out compared to custom content. Ask people to share their opinions and personal experience about the topic. Users tend to respond when they’re asked a question about a matter relevant to them. Besides that, a blog post with a good headline will grab the attention of more readers than the one with a dull headline. A creative and charismatic introduction will encourage them to keep reading.
In addition, it’s only for the good when content is being shared on social media. This kind of personal endorsement greatly benefits newly established businesses because it sends a signal to search engines, thus, it can increase website traffic. And more traffic means more possibilities!
Social networks can generate a lot of overall traffic to your website. However, sharing is not the only option to create engagement when it comes to social media. Social media platforms like Facebook allow their users to boost their content. Boosting your content significantly increases your post reach and is quite inexpensive.
When these aspects are taken into account, content engagement is created. If you’re unsure you might need a professional content strategist to help you out.
Measure Content Engagement
Naturally, the main goal for your website should be to gain a stable audience. The same applies to your social media account as well.
In order to achieve this goal, the website/media account needs to be engaging.
The more your audience is engaged, the more likely they are to return to your channel.
Thus, measuring content engagement is almost equal to measuring the success of your business.
So, how do you calculate engagement? There are various ways and tools. Whenever a consumer likes or shares your blog post, a signal is sent to Google so that the brand knows the audience found the content relevant. In addition, if a visitor liked your content, they might want to express their feelings by leaving a comment. So, you need to observe the comments section as well. In short, any kind of action a user takes indicates that they engage with it.
Social media engagement can also be measured with the number of clicks, DMs, post saves, etc.
You can also use this simple equation as a guide and remember, content engagement rate is always expressed as a %:
Content engagement rate = (total engagements / total number of impressions) x 100
Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides specific content engagement metrics to help you track your engagement rate. They indicate different aspects of content engagement but they’re equally important. They’re all connected so you should observe how they work together. I’ll discuss these metrics below.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of the visitors who only spent a few moments on your website and didn’t start browsing, having left immediately instead.
If the bounce rate is increasing, this should be taken into consideration as it might indicate your website isn’t quite engaging. This can also mean your content requires an update to fully respond to the visitors’ needs.
There’s an important reason why I decided to begin with the bounce rate. If this particular metric isn’t managed well, you won’t succeed in other metrics either. After all, having a high bounce rate means your website failed to leave a good first impression on most of the visitors – they visited one specific page but refused to continue exploring.
If you’re able to keep the bounce rate low, it means your website has grabbed the attention of the audience.
Pages per Session
Pages per session is how many pages one visitor views on average when they land on your site. Ideally, you don’t want the website visitors to leave after viewing one particular piece of content or one particular page. You want them to keep on reading other articles too as this shows how much they’re interested in you. Google measures the average number of pages they view on your site.
However, you also need to start tracking how long one visitor stays on the site. If you notice that visitors leave a page after just a few seconds and move on to other pages, it might mean they can’t find what they’re looking for. This could be an indication that something has to be done.
Average Session Duration
This one’s directly connected with pages per session. If the pages per session metric is high but session duration is low, it seems that users often fail to find their desired information. In other words, you want the visitors to view many pages but you also want their average time spent on the site to be high.
Based on the information that you gain from these few metrics, you should be able to determine the content engagement rate.
If you are struggling to make full use of your website data, a web analytics agency can provide you with all the necessary steps you can take to improve your overall sales based on your website numbers.
Conversion Rate + Equation
There are many more tools to measure content engagement apart from the ones we’ve already discussed. It’s better to stick with the metrics that work best for you. You should keep in mind that the metrics tell you a lot about content’s performance, but not every one of them will provide information about the engagement. Another metric to measure engagement is the conversion rate.
Conversion rate = (total number of conversion / total number of sessions) x 100
Not all content has a specific goal set in terms of conversion rates, but it’s always a good sign as it shows that the content is relevant and the audience can engage with it. Being directly tied to your business’ marketing goals, having a high conversion rate is a great indicator of content engagement.
It Takes More Than Producing Content
Content production is just the beginning. Calculating the content engagement is just as important. You should keep an eye on metrics that give you valuable information such as time spent on the site, level of internal traffic, bounce rate, and many more. Without careful planning and paying attention to these details, all the content you created might not reach its full potential.
Measuring content engagement allows you to know your audience better. Using the information gained from measurement, you’ll be able to create content that is more engaging, relevant, and valuable for the audience.
