How to create content that engages
Building a brand has never been so easy and yet so difficult at the same time. Getting people to engage with your brand can be a helpful tool to create positive awareness. And with the help of behavioral science, you too can create content that engages.
Your content engagement
Do you know how you engage with content?
Everyone is different, and yet we have always felt the urge to categorize people: creating structure in our lives is what we do.
For content engagement we can establish 3 major labels: you can be a mixture of these, or one specific type. You can engage with content in a(n):
- Contextual way: this means that you are placing the content in its context, and wondering how it might affect your social standing. Does this piece of content have a lot of likes, or positive reviews? Do family or friends really like this product?
- Rational way: this means you are taking control of the piece of content, and you analyze it. Does it have the necessary facts to convince you of the quality of this product? The classic “What’s in it for me”-approach that is based on facts and USPs.
- Emotional way: you engage with content by feeling something. What does a piece of content make you feel: joy, trust, aversion? If the piece of content is transparent, or it inspires a sense of community, it will garner your trust.
Our tips
Our tips for engaging content rooted in behavioral science
In our previous blog on behavioral science, we emphasized certain user behaviors in relation to conversion. This time we will discuss how to create more awareness and engagement by making sure your content speaks to people.
Authority bias
People like going with the flow, but to do so we tend to follow charismatic leaders. The authority bias is therefore the tendency to alter our opinions or behavior to match others which we consider to be an authority on the subject.
Anchoring is something we have already discussed as a technique, and if your brand is indeed the anchor - i.e. the market reference – brand awareness, engagement and conversion are slightly easier to come by. However, to build your brand as an anchor, you should consider the use of relevant data to confirm consumers in their purchase decision.
Example: Function of Beauty: this beauty brand carved out a niche for itself in the realm of personalized hair care. They did this by using influencer marketing and partnerships (this tool comes back later), but also gathering data of its potential users to update their website, making it more accessible and easier to navigate.
As a brand you want people in the consideration phase of your digital marketing funnel to engage enough with your content, so they trust you as a brand.
- Use data to categorize customers who are in the consideration phase. An example used for the content engagement types:
- Play to their emotional side by being transparent.
- Convince them with facts and truthful USPs to appeal to their rational side.
- Provide ample reviews and feedback from users so there is enough context to form an informed opinion for contextual content engagers.
- Improve your website UX so people can easily find what they are looking for.
- Lost some people along the way? Try some well-considered retargeting tactics to keep your brand top of mind, or to establish it as an anchor.
People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think brand A is better, but because they are more certain that it is good.
Social proof
Next to completely altering our opinions to those of an authority, we also tend to copy the behavior and actions of other people when we are uncertain, or when a situation is perceived to be ambiguous.
Social proof and context are the main shortcuts you can use to gain brand awareness and engagement for your posts and products/services. You can provide people with testimonials from people they trust – either in real life or online. Also putting the focus on the context in which you can use the product or service, works better than focusing on (technical) features.
Example: for cosmetic brands Avène and René Furterer we established successful influencer campaigns on Instagram. The selection of brand ambassadors is something that was tweaked over the years, finding influencers who authentically engaged with the brand and therefore had a positive effect on overall comments, shares, likes and direct messages, which impact the brand trust directly.
Influencer marketing is the most relevant for this kind of behavior but beware of choosing the wrong influencer for your particular brand. Influencer marketing is no longer a question of just convincing a very popular influencer to sell your product/service; they need to be the right fit. To learn more about this, check out this blog written by my esteemed colleague and in-house influencer expert Carolina.
Additionally, providing reviews on your website, or other online stores, or in search engines will help you build brand trust through contextualization. You can also use these reviews to distinguish the USPs and recycle them into your own content.
Loss aversion
Have you ever come attached to a specific object? A favorite pen or maybe a handy charger that fits right into your pocket for emergencies; something you would hate to misplace, or worse, to lose. That is the concept of loss aversion: objects or services that we are used to and would not like to lose.
With these tools we will predominantly address an emotional way of creating content: we want (potential) customers to avoid feeling bad, and this is the way would present it:
- We will make a positive out of a negative: flipping the script so people get attached to certain things because we highlight the advantages. This will appeal more to people who engage with content in a rational way.
- We will play on emotions: especially sadness, or frustration in case you are not in possession of something.
- Unique images also help to make something stand out, especially when combined with emotion.
Example: Birch Mattresses lets you try their organic mattresses for 100 nights. But after 100 nights, sending it back might mean more effort than just keeping it. Because it’s a comfortable mattress? Hopefully, but the effort of sending it back might convince doubting customers to keep it. Because sending it back would mean they won’t have a mattress, and they would have to go through the whole ordeal of getting another one.
For people to engage with your digital content depends a little bit on the content itself. For social media we see that posts that feature images of pets or children generally do well in terms of engagement. People like and engage more with this type of content, when used appropriately; it needs to be relevant for your brand/product/service. Also being inclusive, and taking an open, transparent stance towards your products and services – like a return policy – will go a long way.
Self-reference effect
Me, myself and I are often the most important people in a person’s life, or so the internet would have you believe. There is some truth in it, as people tend to remember information better when the information has been linked to their own self.
Using graphs, charts and statistics might convince a person who engages rationally with the advantages of your product and why it would make their life much easier. According to the trends we see with our own customers, there is a shift with internet users looking for solutions to their problems. Something AI will also help them with in the future: looking for solutions.
Example: Our customer Oral Care sells toothpaste and other oral hygiene tools and products. For their social campaign we started off with problems that people will have to deal with every day: bad breath, or children not wanting to brush their teeth. With playful content offering a solution for this problem, we drove engagement and traffic to their website.
Make sure you have unique images to illustrate how your product or service can help or assist customers. User generated content – or UGC – can also be beneficial in this regard, and any statistics on your product or service that are relevant to your target audience would work too. And don’t underestimate the power of a good SEO strategy for your website, including UX.
Semantic processing
It’s not only what you say, but also how you say it. Humans have a certain way of processing words they hear or read; we automatically associate them with other words.
That’s why the memorability of texts can play such a big part in getting people to engage with your message. And this does not mean that you have to dumb things down: thanks to our associative brain, we can omit things and our brain will make up for it. Even better, it will encourage people to think deeper, and make a meaningful connection. This also means that you need to pay attention to the so-called “Florida effect”: words can have an impact on behavior, whether people are aware of it or not.
Example: Our client Essilor asked us to create content for their Belgian opticians. We used a lot of gamification to engage their loyal audience on Facebook, next to educational content as well on the Essilor website. Especially games that require a little bit of mental exercise prove to be successful, and in an always-on approach it helps to prepare your audience for more product-specific content with posts that are loosely based around a common theme.
Make your brand fun to engage with, through gamification paired with informative content, or a good SEO strategy. Make people feel something when they see your branded content to form positive associations with your brand, so they remember you when it matters.
Rhyme and unexpectancy
Rhyme has always been used to link information together and make it more memorable. Think of all those medieval ballads, poetry or a catchy song. And as we are trained to identify the odd one out – Von Restorff effect, anyone? – the unexpected will also pop out more to your audience.
So, your tools are very language-based ones: experimenting with rhymes, adjectives, inspiring language that grab the attention. Don’t forget to use evocative language: engage all of your audience’s senses.
Example: Colgate is a good example of engaging language, stimulating all your senses and your funny bone.
Good copywriting should be at the heart of everything, because even though we are living in a visual world, people are still drawn to words. Experimenting with a specific tone of voice on social media helps your branding and to stay top of mind. Adopting a more funny, tongue-in-cheek tone of voice, or rather more formal but educational tone: that’s up to you.
We ❤️ content
Content makes your brand go viral
As digital marketing is entering its AI era, Engagement is getting more important again for brands as human connection provides a competitive edge. Audience participation, unexpectedness and established tastemakers are what makes content go viral, and all of it starts with a good idea that is put into words and/or images.
Need an experienced translator for your brilliant brand ideas, or some wacky creative minds to come up with them in the first place? Send us an email, carrier pigeon or just pick up the phone and call us. Me and my content creation colleagues can’t wait to put pen to paper!