Captivating content that engages your audience is key to all marketing practices, and is the Holy Grail that as marketers we all strive to achieve. Why? Because engaged audiences are where money is made.

Attention is a currency. If your content captures someone’s attention, you have a higher likelihood of getting your marketing message across. It’s also essential for you as a company to produce high quality content that engages your audience if you want to rank highly in the search results.

However, increased engagement from your target audience does not come from bombarding them with apathetic content, hoping something strikes gold. To build brand reputation and to cultivate a loyal customer base, you must first instil trust. Producing unrewarding, low value content, will only cause your readership to assume that the product or service you are trying to sell is equally so.

If the content contains enough value, people will share it with their network of friends. This can lead to an increase in reach and a rise in traffic of potential customers. To see higher conversion rates from a campaign, you should include a persuasive call to action (CTA), which acts to push users towards a desired conversion.

So how do you create content that captures your audience’s attention? High engagement levels come from quality content, by activating emotional responses in consumers. This is achieved in various ways depending on the demographic, and overall success will be determined by how much the content resonates with your audience.

It is therefore important to understand audiences in as much detail as possible. Learning their likes, dislikes and habits can hugely contribute to the likelihood of creating a successful campaign.

Creating hooks in content that seek to encourage specific responses are essential in achieving the content’s purpose. Many purchasing decisions are thought to be made subconsciously, through triggers from past experiences, learned associations and other ingrained psychological tendencies that unearth emotions.

It is for this reason that there are trigger words and phrases that consistently perform well at grabbing people’s attention, drawing them in to consume your content and then even share it. Content possessing a message that resonates with the target audience emotionally is vital, as this yields the greatest engagement.