Three effective written content formats that engage target customers
So, you’ve taken the steps to qualify your content ideas and organised this content into user-friendly pillars. Now you need to consider the most effective content formats in order to boost user engagement.
The trouble that a lot of marketers face is feeling like you’re shouting into the abyss. You can create written content as much as you like, but if it’s not engaging your audience, then what’s the point?
If your content isn’t getting the results you want, we’re here to help. In this blog post, we’ll cover three tried-and-tested article formats that will attract and engage target customers.
1. The walkthrough
This format does exactly as it says on the tin. The walkthrough entails walking your readers through how to do something, step by step.
If you want your walkthrough to rank highly and keep readers engaged to the final step, you’ll need to go heavy on the detail. Think clearly defined steps, excellent examples, images to provide visual context and links to other useful, high-quality resources.
Packing in this level of detail is time consuming, but the pay-off can be huge. If you’ve searched for anything marketing related in the last few years, you’ll see Hubspot dominating the search results with its walkthroughs.
If you can find a topic that hasn’t been successfully covered by one of these articles or where the current content that’s ranking isn’t good enough, there’s a real opportunity to provide the definitive article on it.
It’s important to remember that users are giving up a lot of time to read your walkthrough. You need to reassure them in your opening paragraphs that it’s going to be worth it. Here are a few things to bear in mind:
Make it as accessible as possible: Add a table of contents with anchor links at the top of the article, as we’ve done in this article, that allows users to skip to the bit that’s relevant.
Dig into the pain point: What’s the problem your walkthrough is going to solve? Why does the reader need to fix it right now?
Showcase your expertise: You need to let readers know that they can trust your advice. What experience do you have that qualifies you as an expert? Mentioning big-name clients or touching briefly on a success story will really help with this.
2. The resource roundup
Unlike walkthroughs, resource roundups are relatively quick to put together – though they require a good amount of research.
With this type of content, you provide a curated list of links that point people towards useful resources when there’s lots of information available.
Roundups can be created to support major events or changes that will affect your customers, such as regulatory updates.
We know that directing customers to other websites might not feel natural. But, when we’ve created resource roundups at Inkwell, they’ve been some of our highest trafficked, perennial pages.
Here’s one we first started five years ago that’s now on the front page of Google and the top result for a number of keywords (at the time of writing).
Resource roundups are a great way to pull your resources together and create concise, clickable content. Though pointing customers to other resources may feel counterintuitive at first, you’ll be able to build a reputation for being the go-to site for sharing relevant, unbiased and up-to-date insight.
Here are three important things to keep in mind when creating resource roundups:
Make sure you include reputable sources: Ideally, official bodies like gov.uk where readers can trust the information. It goes without saying that you don’t want to link to direct competitors either!
Keep your roundups updated with the latest information: Resource roundups are only effective if they’re kept up to date. You want readers to be able to bookmark the page and check back when there are changes. The original publication date on the article will stay the same unless you update it, so add a note in the introduction telling people when the article was last updated.
Finally, don’t forget a call to action! If there’s a tonne of traffic hitting the site, have a strategy for capturing it and keeping it within your ecosystem.
3. Storytelling
Customers connect with personal stories. That’s why ‘About’ and ‘Team’ pages are always popular – people want to know who’s behind the brand.
Stories are a great way to give your business a human face and showcase your achievements, but the key thing to remember is that they need to feel personal and real. That means showing vulnerability and talking about challenges you overcame or things that were difficult – something your audience can relate to.
If you’re unsure on where to start, the ‘hero’s journey’ is a good storytelling device.
This template is everywhere. You’ll have seen it in books (The Lord of the Rings) to movies (Star Wars) to TV shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The hero goes on an adventure, faces a challenge, emerges victorious and then comes home transformed.
You can use this device for any story you want to tell about your business.
Let’s say you want to talk about a big campaign you just ran. Start by asking yourself these questions:
The adventure: What was the campaign and why were you running it?
The challenge: What was difficult along the way?
The hero emerges victorious: How did you overcome the challenge?
Returning home transformed: How did the campaign end? What impact did it have and what lessons did you learn?
Being open about challenges can feel uncomfortable in marketing, but it’s an important element of this type of article. It makes you more relatable, it keeps people hooked and it’s a really good opportunity to provide value to your audience.
We used the storytelling device when we recounted how coronavirus disrupted The Pitch and we had two months to move everything online. You can read the article here.
For more tips on creating written content that engages your audience and ranks well on search, have a look at our other articles:
Four ways to generate content ideas from data and search queries
How to qualify your content ideas and determine what could rank on Google
Want to learn more about what we do? Get in touch with one of the team and we’ll discuss how we can help your site traffic grow with expertly curated content.
