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5 Secrets to Creating Content that Resonates

Getting traffic to your content is one thing, but getting people to stick around, actually read it, and then get it to resonate is virtually impossible these days.

Creating content that resonates with your audience is continuously discussed, but finding that elusive hook can give your article excellent positioning in your audience’s eyes. However, it’s not enough to come up with just a great topic and a fantastic angle anymore.

To make your content and brand resonate, you need to create experiences that strike a chord. The purpose of making an emotional connection with your content is to get your audience to do one thing — choose your brand over the others. To do this, your content needs to create an emotional appeal and shift perception, drive preference, and ultimately lead to a purchase.

But don’t stress! While all of these ideas may sound overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be a complicated process. With a few tried and true secrets from the Sage Island castaways, you can create content that reaches your audience, resonates with them, and encourages them to hit that purchase button!

Know your audience. 

This sounds obvious, but it is crucial to fully understand who your ideal customer is and what makes them tick. The best messaging speaks to one individual and their specific issues, wants, and needs. Content that is written generically for faceless users will miss the mark.

If you haven’t already, you must create detailed buyer personas that paint a distinct picture of who exactly you are trying to reach. These are shaped through market research and insights from actual customers, whether it be by a survey, interviews, or data. These will focus on details such as:

  • Background
  • Gender
  • Age
  • Location
  • Financial situation
  • Identifiers
  • Career
  • Family

Knowing this information gives a peek into their background, demographics, and communication preferences. This insight will highlight what does or doesn’t sell since content that convinces one prospective client might turn off another.

Use emotion to motivate.

Use emotion, not just language, to make your message resonate with your target audiences.

Once your business speaks to your audiences’ emotional responses, you can motivate actions from social media sharing to repeat purchases to referrals.

Be relatable. 

There are many ways your content can strike a chord with your audience. It could be through humor, delight, or just showing that you care about your customer’s problems.

To create an emotional connection, your content needs to:

  • Link an idea with an emotion.
  • Create interest through both style and format.
  • Convey enough emotion for the story to be memorable.
  • Describe how and why your business overcame struggles.

Use storytelling and a human element to help your audiences connect and build that elusive brand engagement.

Help them learn.

Many brands want to build thought leadership by creating authoritative and credible content. But to do this, you have to do more than push your product or service. Thought leadership is about solving, not selling.

People wake up thinking about their problems, not your company. Audiences need solutions to their issues and answers to all their questions. They need resources that will help them learn and find ways to solve their problems. When you make it a point to be the best answer to their issue, you will truly resonate with them.

Visuals are essential. 

While the words you write are important, it’s crucial that you create visually appealing content, particularly for the reader with a limited attention span; which these days is most. Preferably, you want to break up the text by adding visuals to really make the content pop or to highlight key points. You can do this by including:

  • Photos – Attempt to break up written content and convey your story without saying anything.
  • Infographics – Palatable visuals that highlight a statistic or critical aspect of the piece are a creative way to engage your reader. Even if your audience doesn’t have time to read the whole piece, they can quickly scan and see those essential metrics.
  • Videos – Videos let you tell a story, provide an explanation, or emphasize your point.

If you want to create content that resonates, the first step you must take is knowing your audience. From there, you can target them by producing content that is informative, readable, provides value, and is visually appealing.

So, are you ready to get writing and launch your new content strategy with these content secrets? If not, it’s okay. The Sage Island team has you covered! Contact us today to speak with someone from our team about your marketing goals, and we’ll help you make it happen!

 

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