Creating content isn’t easy.  In fact it is a huge amount of work for most businesses – so how do you know if it’s worth all of the effort?  How do you know if your content is engaging?  What signals should you be looking for?

How do you measure engagement?

In real life, if you are networking and meeting someone for the first time, it’s easy to know if they are engaging with them.  They listen to what you are saying, they interact with you, they get your contact details, and they stay in touch.  If what you are saying doesn’t strike a chord with them, they’ll move on…possibly to your competitor.

You can think of engaging with your visitors through content in a similar way to networking in ‘real life’. In the digital world, engagement is an action that they take with you, from the smallest interaction (a ‘like’ on social media) to the biggest one (sharing your content with others, or getting in touch with you).  If people do not take action there are two things we look at to find out what the reason is:
1. Are you making it easy for them to engage with you?
2. Are the people who are reading the content making it to the end?

If we answer those questions we can track down if the issue is with your copy, or your customer journey, or both.  The answer to the question is found in the statistics of your website and social media accounts.  We always recommend Google Analytics as it’s free, easy to install, and has possibly the most comprehensive data available. 

You can see information like:

• How long someone has spent on your page (Time on Page)
• How they found you (Acquisition Data)
• The percentage of people visiting more than one page (Bounce Rate)
• How many pages people are looking at (Pages per Session)
• And more.

Additional information like how many external links to your articles can be found using tools like ahrefs which tell you that your content is so interesting someone will even link to it from their own site.

How do you improve engagement?

Once you’ve tracked down the cause of your poor engagement, there are three main ways you can begin to improve it:

1. Make it easy to engage with you.

Are you shouting but not being heard?  By adding share buttons to your website, and sharing your content on all of your social channels, you will be able to maximise the ways your readers can engage with you.  Different people like to interact in different ways, so by providing them with as many ways as possible to engage with your content, you increase the likelihood of them doing so.

2. Improve the quality of your content.

If you have checked the data and it’s clear that people are seeing your content, but not engaging (i.e. impressions are high but interactions are low, or time on page is low) then you are shouting the wrong message, and it’s time to look at your content.  Solving this problem is not easy, so you may want to ask an expert to audit the copy and see where they think you’re going wrong.

3. Maximise your current engagement

Are you speaking back to those who engage?  As the saying goes, it’s easier to sell to existing customers than new ones.  It’s also easier to get people to re-engage than engage for the first time, so make sure you are encouraging them by speaking back to them.  When people comment on your social posts or blog articles, reply to their comments.  Thank them, ask them questions.  When others see the care you take over those who speak to you, they’ll be encouraged to start interacting with you too

If you need more help, get in touch and we’ll do what we can to make your content work for you!