How to Catch (and Keep) Your Audience’s Attention Online
by Eliza Mationg
It’s an understatement to say that consumers are bombarded with a lot of content every day. Each time they open their apps and scroll through their feeds, hundreds, if not thousands, of images, videos, captions, and stories are pushed onto their screens, and the sheer amount of information received has turned many of us into passive consumers of content. Most times, audiences barely even have the time to process the content they’re presented before moving on to the next thing.
This onslaught of content has become an unavoidable reality in a world where most of our work and leisure time is spent online and accomplished with the help of technology and social media; everyone has become dependent on digital platforms for basically any activity.
Brands, from start-ups to large businesses, have embraced using digital platforms to evolve with the times and to stay relevant. Given this, the public has to contend with branded content from all directions, potentially leading to users being overloaded as social media channels and published materials continue to increase in number, seemingly to no end.
To stand out in the sea of information and remain visible among competitors, brands must create engaging and quality content. While what counts as relevant content varies from brand to brand, there are a few universal best practices you can keep in mind if the goal is to get your audience’s attention:
- Keep the audience’s interests in mind
High-quality content that is relevant to the market should be the main focus of your brand’s social media presence. Providing what the target market wants and needs will keep them from passively bypassing the content, which entails understanding the nuances of your targeted audience.
Conducting extensive research to create a persona that will help uncover the needs, behavior, experiences, and goals of your targeted audience, therefore, is crucial for your—and for any—brand.
- Elevate your visual content
Compared to other (read: text-heavy) types of content, images and videos are more likely to get shared—nearly more than 40% more. This is because visuals increase the effectiveness of data visualization and they are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster as compared to text.
Creating quality videos is a highly effective strategy to elevate your brand’s digital presence. This specific type of content allows your business to convey emotions and prove the importance of your services and goods to your market.
Producing original, relatable, visually compelling video narratives that showcase your identity as a brand can successfully drive engagement and garner positive reactions from a wider audience that can increase brand loyalty and conversion. In other words, through images and other visual content, your market is more likely to understand the delivered message at one glance, engage with the post before they scroll again, and become more receptive to your calls to action.
- Add value to your audience’s lives
Once businesses prove to their audience that they are not only selling services and products but can also provide a consistent stream of reliable information and insights catered to help their market in other areas of their lives, consumers will voluntarily search for other content from the same brand.
If you can show your market that they can benefit from the knowledge, content, and resources you are producing and sharing with them, your brand can transcend mere awareness and build loyalty, foster relationships with, and even find advocates amongst your followers.
- Leverage the power of emotions
Instigating emotions is one of the most powerful strategies that can capture the attention of a target audience. In fact, content crafted with a more emotional slant performs up to 31% better than more fact-driven material.
With this in mind, businesses should grasp the power of releasing persuasive content that taps different emotions of their market to achieve deeper and more authentic connections. Through this, brands can immediately achieve their desired business’ action from their market, at the same time, obtain loyalty and advocates that will boost their financial growth.
- Create winning captions
The value of engaging, well-structured copy can never be overlooked. Think of your caption as the voice that goes with your images and videos: it adds context to your story, and has the power to engage your audience in a conversation. This means, then, that your copy—whether it’s captions, video titles, even hashtags—must adhere to your brand’s equity and speak directly to who you’re talking to. Whether you’re leaning towards the formal and professional or relaxed and casual, your tone must resonate with the kind of audience you have.
No matter what your brand and what your audience’s behavior are, you must structure your copy in a consistent manner, and never understate the importance of what the objectives of each particular piece of content is intended to do.
- Study your competitors’ content
Analyzing content and social media strategy from other brands can help businesses better understand certain demographics and markets that respond to the most. Through this exercise, the trends in strategies, techniques, and best practices that perform well within the same type of audience will be recognized. Spotting these trends also helps your brand pinpoint what doesn’t work and what should be avoided.
The benefits businesses can acquire by providing stop-scrolling content are profound. While time-consuming and often requiring additional resources, your brand can reap rewards that ripple across all aspects of your business, making investing in a strong content strategy one of utmost importance in the current climate.
Not sure where to start? Tap into SAGA’s more than two decades of experience in working with both local and global brands across multiple industries to help build your content strategy, and schedule a consultation with our team!
