It takes quite a bit of creativity, skill and experience to create captivating and engaging marketing content out of thin air. Many writers and marketers often endure terrible cases of writers or designers block as they try to create content that have mind blowing topics, fantastic information and that eventually results in conversions. If you find yourself in a pinch with no clue as to how to improve your marketing content for more likes, shares and engagement then you can definitely give the following seven tips a go.

1. Identify your target audience

One of the first things you should do is to find out exactly whom you are speaking with when you are engaging on social media. To help identify your target audience you can ask yourself the following questions;

• What is the age category of most of your customers? This will give you a great idea of the tone you should be using for marketing content.
• What is the main interest of your target audience? The most common interests of your particular client sector can give you great ideas to improve visual content.
• Where do most of your customers live? This will enable you to engage better with them.
• What about culture?

2. It’s ok to steal ideas from competitors

Your competitors are a great source of ideas for great marketing content. Start following their social media pages, check out what type of ads receives the most reaction and engagement and try to create something similar.

Pro Tip: You can use competitor advertising research platforms such as SEMRush, SpyFu, AdBeat, WhatRunsWhere, BigBigAds, SimilarWeb, and others to get more insight into their ecommerce activities. It’s never been easier to track down your competitors’ advertising campaigns.

3. Find out what topics are trendy

Do an online search and find out what articles, blogs or content are most popular for your particular niche. If you know that there is a particular interest in the content you are sharing then you boost the chances of getting more client feedback.

Pro tip: Buzz Sumo. Use that!

4. It’s all in the title!

The first thing someone will read when they view your content is your title. It is critical to have the right title and not just for your articles or general content. Product descriptions or articles have to have an amazing title so customers will be inspired to click that button for redirection.

If your titles aren’t exciting, how are you ever going to stand out? While the term ‘clickbait’ gets a bad rap, the truth is that if you don’t present your content to be exciting – nobody’s going to get excited to read it.

Here’s a fun tool you can use to get fresh ideas on how to write titles that generate excitement: http://www.cs.uvic.ca/cbgeneration/

5. Stay updated!

Public interests are constantly changing and you need to be aware of these changes so you can constantly provide them with content that they actually want to read or that will prickle their attention.

When you start analyzing trends you’ll notice that ‘buzz’ and excitement in social media rises and falls with the news. Whatever’s hot in politics or celebrity news can be leveraged to attract attention. If you have content relevant to current events, sometimes all it takes is some hashtags and some fresh posting to get a ton of free publicity around your content.

6. Engagement is the key

People want to see that you are a human company that truly cares about them. Client engagement is so important for a good and positive vibe. If someone comments on your posts; answer. It could also be a good idea to like some customer posts – especially ones about your product or service or to even share something relative to your company to your page.

If all you have is canned automated responses to your audience, you’ll never resonate with them. Being accessible is what makes certain celebrities so popular on twitter. If you follow Mark Hamill on twitter (@HamillHimself) you’ll see how he engages successfully with his followers, which only makes him even MORE popular. 

7. Keep learning

You are bound to make a lot of mistakes when you are sharing content and some content is going to perform much better than others. Learn from your mistakes, learn from the reaction and engagement towards certain content and constantly upgrade your methods.

There’s almost nothing worse than working with your team about content and hearing things like ‘this is how we have to do it’ and being closed minded to trying new things. Often it’s worthwhile to try ‘old’ things in new circumstances and discover that they’re effective once again. Always be trying new strategies! It’s the ONLY way to stand out!

With these seven tips you are bound to be able to create content that much more people will love to read and you are bound to find ideas to match your scalable content needs.