How to Create Engaging Content that Inspires Loyalty and Trust

Have you ever wondered about the importance of content when marketing a product or an idea? Good content means good marketing. And a good content is engaging content. Such that helps build the image of your brand, and help you gain trust and consumer loyalty.

Achieving all of that through your content is far more difficult than you think. In this article, we will answer questions about what is considered to be good content marketing.

“Your content needs to be emotionally engaging. Whether it’s awe, laughter, or surprise, evoking emotions creates a connection that keeps people coming back for more.”
– Neil Patel, Digital Marketing Expert

How to Create Engaging Content: Main Factors

1. Customer Engagement
2. Brand Trust
3. Audience Loyalty

1. Customer Engagement

When creating content, the main purpose for it would be high customer engagement. Suppose you start a blog. Your main goal is to drive as much traffic to it as possible, and to achieve this, engaging people is your first priority. 

Customer engagement is the heart and soul of any marketing strategy, and producing high-quality value-adding content is the first step towards creating it.

According to Clarabridge, a fully-engaged customer can yield 23% more revenue than average. Furthermore, highly-engaged customers are very likely to buy more from you, and promote your products and services to their peers.

In today’s day and age, there are various methods and channels to engage your prospects. Unfortunately, this is where the problem arises. We live in a world where we have access to unlimited amounts of information right at our fingertips.

As a result, customers don’t want to be sold to, but to be given the freedom to make an informed purchase decision on their own time. 

This means that to grab your clients’ attention, first you need to become excellent at anticipating their needs and wants. Then, to keep these customers engaged, you need to develop a strong customer engagement plan that takes into account every touching of the customer journey.    

Some people consider customer engagement as an all-important key performance indicator of a brand’s customer relationship health, however, this is true to an extent.

Essentially, customer engagement boils down to how much and how often your audience interacts with your brand. It’s a big umbrella category of various metrics to track – likes, shares, comments, brand mentions, etc.

And because there are so many digital channels you can use, it can be difficult to measure without the right resources, tools, and experience.

A high engagement rate indicates that the audience is responsive to your content and very well aware of your brand. However, just because you can successfully grab your audience’s attention with your content, it doesn’t automatically mean that they are going to show brand loyalty. 

So, in addition to aiming for high customer engagement rates, you need to find a way to show your prospects that your company is one of the good ones out there and that you have your clients’ best interests in mind. In other words, you need to gain your audience’s confidence and trust.

2. Brand Trust

Gaining trust for your brand is fairly difficult. If we were to describe brand trust, it would be how the consumers see and feel about your brand and the people behind it.

 

Customer trust is vital for success. It’s the most important part of your overall brand strategy, as it makes you the reliable choice for consumers.

Once brand trust is built, and your customers are so sure of your brand that they recommend it to their friends, family, and colleagues, it will transform into brand loyalty, earning you a sustained competitive advantage worthy of envy.

Ubiquity is the key to gaining brand trust. Your content strategy needs to cover different marketing channels. For instance, you have a very convincing article on your blog, but only three people read it. What is the use of it, then?

You need to bring the content to the people. Rather than just posting words, start effective conversations, use images, share valuable information from a different brand not related to your agenda. Your content should move from social to physical, from words on the computer to words of mouth.

Don’t be afraid to showcase what you can deliver to your clients. Use social proof, user reviews, case studies, and client testimonials to add more value and capture consumer trust.

Truth is when people respond well to people. You can create a catchy slogan or a vivid design, but it might still be less effective than a favorite movie star.

People create affinity to your brand. Instead of just focusing on content, share the focus on who is going to use it.

3. Audience Loyalty

Audience, or brand loyalty, often means how many people return to your website, open and read your emails and newsletters, follow and engage with your social media accounts.

Building this loyalty needs focus and research. You need to define your goals, set clear objectives and work on achieving them.

When thinking about your content strategy, use content that works for you. Ask yourself: What makes consumers trust my brand? Then come up with a creative way to proactively communicate it to them. It could be a great quote, a GIF, a video, or even a fun meme.

Figuring out what content gets you brand loyalty requires patience. You do not need to switch between content formats if one thing doesn’t seem to be working right away. Give it time, and see if it gains momentum.

Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi puts this in this way:

The sheer majority of brands will continue to crash and burn with their content creation and distribution efforts. Simply put, most brands resist telling a truly differentiated story, and even those that do tell one aren’t consistent or patient enough to build loyal audiences over time.

For starters, you can use the template from Authority Rainmaker. It will provide you with an analysis of what content on your website is doing well with the visitors.

Once you know the type of content that is working for you, calculate the ROI using Siege Media’s content marketing ROI calculator to get the costs estimated for the content.

Bonus Tips for Engaging Content

1. Establish Real Relationships with Consumers
2. Personalize Content
3. Educate Through Content

1. Establish Real Relationships with Consumers

The key to running a successful business, building and keeping an image, and evolving is to have the audience on your side. To do this, you have to establish a real connection with them. Also mind the following:

Don’t Ignore Negative Feedback

Feedback is an essential part of the business communication process which helps brands evolve, polish their content, get significant insights into consumers’ needs, and predict potential problems. Many brands think that if they simply ignore negative opinions, a problem will mysteriously disappear.

This idea couldn’t be more wrong, as people talk, they share news and opinions and influence with one another. It just a matter of time until negative feedback starts backfiring and influencers and media start seeing your brand as a problem.

It’s essential to answer to feedback, especially negative ones. If the user is right, be responsible, apologize, work on the issue, assure the proper measures are being taken and try to resolve the problem as fast as possible.

In more drastic cases, it might be a good approach to also offer compensation. If the user is not right to complain, on the other hand, explain the situation to them politely as well as that you’ve done everything possible for your clients.

Reduce any chances that your communication could be used against you if it goes public (e.g., via the social media).

Make Your Engaged Audience Feel Involved

Communicating with your community is essential. First, they’re the people for whom your brand is built; second of all, your leads probably understand your brand and could be an excellent source of fresh ideas and insights about potential issues.

It’s vital to ensure you have a way to communicate with your community, e.g., emails, comments under articles and in social media, chat.

Collect the data from clients’ opinions and use it to polish your content strategy and answer to audience needs. Also, make sure you reward people who’ve helped you come up with useful ideas, this will turn them into ambassadors and stimulate other leads to also approach you.

This approach will not only help you build trust, but will also significantly impact your image and help you build a community that supports you.

2. Personalize Content

The best content you can present users with is one that you’re sure they’d be interested in. One way of doing this is by working with the data about your buyer personas, listening to social media and monitoring the performance of different types of content.

Another helpful way is if you give users the option to select what topics and content they are interested in. This could happen while they’re registering, through a web form on your site, via the newsletter sign-up sections or when you ask users to allow your cookies or push notifications.

This approach helps you deliver personally-tailored content to various specific groups of leads. It helps you build an image of being a valuable source of information that cares about its clients, which in turn, positively affects consumer trust in your brand.

Other helpful tricks for putting important finishing touches on your content are to address the user by name or username if the channel allows it, to abstain from “too formal” writing style in a direct communication (email, chat, tickets), and to always speak through a brand’s employee rather than a single profile for the whole office.

3. Educate Through Content

The easiest way to turn viewers into leads and clients is when you have something to offer in return. Providing your audience with valuable content that helps them acquire expertise in a certain topic, is like reaching with a helping hand. This approach builds trusts with consumers and reputation as an expert in the field.

Data-Driven Blogging

One of the most natural ways to provide engaging content to your leads is through your blog. The most crucial thing you should never forget is that you’re doing this for your clients, so you might as well base your articles on the information you already have about your buyer personas.

This way you’ll be able to provide more consumer-tailored content that gets viewers engaged and turns them into clients over time.

This said, keep in mind that your content has to build up on the knowledge people already have. It has to offer something more, a new experience, a lesson, a handy trick, or a latest trend. Presenting readers with practical solutions makes them see you as trustworthy and professional.

Moreover, blogging is one of the easiest ways to test what content performs best with your audience. This way you’ll be able to provide more materials that your customers are interested in, nurture a community, educating it and giving them a solid base for long-term trust.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget that once you lose a consumer’s trust, you’ll hardly ever regain it, especially when it comes to written materials. This is why it’s essential to speak through real-life examples and back what you’re claiming with statistics and reliable data from authoritative sources.

Bottom Line

Creating engaging content can help your brand develop trust and loyalty. It also allows you to understand the long term benefits of good content marketing. The success of good content is the success of your brand.

And putting out successful content might take a bit of effort on your part. Planning, searching, and then implementing what is best for your site will likely deliver the results you want.

And remember, you will need to stand out and engage people in order to get trust and loyalty from your clients. Luckily, you can always rely on us if you’re feeling overwhelmed. As a B2B agency, we are specialized in delivering various marketing solutions, including content marketing.