As business owners, it is crucial that we know how to create engaging content to attract our ideal customers and drive traffic to our sites.

The key to creating engaging content is a purposeful strategy.

As we all know, content is king when it comes to running a successful business. The thing is, the idea of creating content that not only looks good but generates engagement, and ultimately sales can be overwhelming without a clear strategy.

Whether the content you’re creating is a video for YouTube, blogs for a site, or solid social media posts, your content has to be of high quality and engaging.

The way that brands are able to create engaging content with these two traits is by focusing efforts around the brand’s purpose and strategy.

***This post contains affiliate links which mean at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission if you decide to invest in them. But, I love them so much, I would recommend all of the following tools even if I weren’t an affiliate for them!***

 

Let’s dive into the 5 Steps to Create Engaging Content

 

1 | Identify the Purpose

Every business is started with a “why” — a reason for starting the company, a problem being solved by bringing the company to life. Pinpointing this reason is step one.

Next, it’s important to strategize how the business can solve these problems and make an even bigger impact while inspiring an audience to trust and support in this purpose and mission.

 

2 | Pick your main content channel

There are so many options for delivering content these days — blogs, podcasts, videos, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — it seems neverending. 

However, a huge key to generating QUALITY content is to make sure that efforts are very focused.

Never neglect the other chosen channels but always having one channel as the primary source of communication.

Personally, I currently have my blog posts set as my main content channel. These posts then get shared as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter posts, and then broken up into Instagram captions!

Are you a product-based brand?

• Maybe posting beautiful lifestyle shots on Instagram is the best route.

Are you a service-based company?

• Tutorials and educational videos on YouTube may be the way to go.

 

All in all, there are plenty of options for what to choose as your main channel which is why starting with purpose is key as that will be the guiding principle for these decisions.

 

3 | Develop a clear strategy

This part is probably the most daunting part. However, developing a clear strategy will be the guideposts for when business is booming and content needs to be pushed out quickly while still showcasing a stellar quality.

There are seven steps to developing this strategy:

1. Define your content’s goal
2. Identify your Ideal Customer
3. Run a content audit of what content has worked well.
   • (Check your Analytics & Insights!)
4. Determine a content management system
   • (Personally, I use ASANA and Airtable*)
5. Brainstorm ideas in your content management system
6. Determine the type of content to create
7. Publish and manage engagement!

 

4 | Implement a system

A system will look something like brainstorm topics, create, edit, publish, market. However, there are tools to help accomplish each of these pieces.

Here is a screenshot from my own Blog Content Calendar that I’ve created in Asana. 

Check out some of my favorite tools to help you to create engaging content:

• For brainstorming topics — HubSpot Blog Idea Generator

• Check out these ideas that we’ve curated for you here!

• For creating with ease amongst team members — Google Docs

• For help with publishing and tracking efforts — CoSchedule*

• For marketing — integrate push efforts through CoSchedule so that the content gets pushed out to the other channels or utilize the email subscribers list that’s been built in a system such as Flodesk* (My preferred email marketing platform.)

 

5 | Publish and Market

Content created is nothing if there isn’t a system for getting it in front of viewers. Making sure there’s an easy way to move from completed content to marketing, is very important.

Whether it’s through social media,email marketing, or digital ads, there has to 

be a way to get the content in front of the people who need to see it.

Once you’ve published it to your main content channel, now it’s time to spread it out across all of your platforms.

To do this, I use CoSchedule* which lets me automagically send out my main content (a blog post) across all of my social media channels to be scheduled at the best time for my audiences as can be seen below.

This saves me so much time when it comes to making sure that all of my content is going out to my Facebook Page, LinkedIn, & Twitter pages the day of publishing, the day after, and one month later to ensure people have plenty of opportunities to view the content.

For Instagram content, I pull bits and pieces from the blog post to create captions and schedule them using Plann*, my go-to Instagram scheduling tool.

As you can see, I have a fairly streamlined process that allows me and my VA to create engaging content and send it across all of our marketing channels with ease!

 

To wrap it up, I want you to remember that when it comes to creating engaging content for your business it is going to take some trial and error to figure out what sort of content really gets your audience engaged.

Once you find it though, your process is going to be super clear and easy to manage!

 

Do you need help coming up with content ideas?

If so, I invite you to download my FREE Guide to 27 Content Ideas to help you post with purpose!