It’s no secret that content is critical for connecting with your target audience and establishing brand awareness. But businesses today have to go above and beyond simply maintaining a blog and sharing content on social media to engage their followers in a meaningful way. You can see this by the way people are scrolling through content at lightning speed these days.

The video shows how social media apps grab our attention, and then we’re hooked. (Video Source)

So how do you know you’ve created compelling content? 

Your audience stops scrolling long enough to interact with your content. Something has caught their eye. Maybe they read or they hit ‘like’. They could also leave a comment or share your post. Basically, they do something that demonstrates they noticed your content. 

Here are some ideas to create scroll-stopping content:

1.  Use headlines to grab your audience’s attention

Engagement starts with grabbing your audience’s attention. This means putting in the effort to create clear and impactful headlines. It’s your first opportunity to get your content noticed and make an impression. 

Practical tips to consider: 

• Keep your title short 
• Use an active voice 
• Ask a question 
• Use numbers 
• Be specific 
• Use emotion 

How do you combine all these points to create compelling content? Try this—when you start scrolling through content, compile 30 titles that made you stop, pause, and engage with it. Find similarities between all the titles to understand what common points made you pay attention. 

2. Leverage visuals as a strategic way to hold your audience’s attention

As marketers, you rely on visuals to draw attention to your posts, but—and this is especially true for smaller businesses—you often lack the skills or resources to consistently produce compelling, professionally designed visuals. As a result, you end up taking shortcuts—and suffer the consequences. For example, a study shows that 40% of marketers rely on stock images for visuals, but a mere 13% said doing so helped them achieve their marketing goals. 

The importance of visuals for content marketing

To keep your images more interesting, try these tools:

• Pixaloo is an app that adds special effects, backgrounds, and overlays to traditional photos to make images more interesting and dramatic. 
• Canva gives even the least experienced marketer the chance to craft professional visuals—everything from images to social cards to videos. 
• Get Stencil lets you create tailored image templates and gives you access to stock images that you can customize. 

3. Tailor your content for the platform you’re using

Busy marketers tend to use the same visuals and copy across all platforms, which can be ineffective. For example, if you’re posting on Facebook, your copy likely has a clickable link incorporated in it. If you’re using the same copy for Instagram, take note that Instagram doesn’t allow for clickable links, which means you can’t use the same text for both platforms. 

The content you’re creating should be tailored to fit its primary audience and platform. You wouldn’t publish a full blog on a visual platform like Instagram or Pinterest, but it makes sense to do so on Facebook or LinkedIn. It doesn’t make sense to post static images on video platforms like YouTube or TikTok. 

Try: 

• Spotify for social and audio formats
• YouTube, Instagram Reels, and TikTok for video content
• Reddit or Quora for discussion forums
• Instagram or Pinterest for visual content
• LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter for business
• Your own blog for informative, brand-related content 

4. Include video in your post

Videos used to be very complicated to produce. These days, however, technology has made it so much simpler. Why, then, wouldn’t you leverage all the potential of video to get you noticed? Video has the highest conversion rates than any other form of digital marketing content, delivering 90% more conversion than campaigns that don’t have video.  

• If you really don’t have time to create an original video, curating content and including a highly relevant video in your blog posts is a must. 
• Shooting video testimonials using your phone is easy enough to do and is a highly effective marketing tool that can help boost your credibility. 
• Repurposing old blog posts and turning them into a quick video can be a good way to simplify video creation. 

5.  Satisfy user intent immediately

Once your reader lands on your content, you have a very short time to convince them that you’re worth their time. What does this mean for you? You have to satisfy user intent quickly—your content has to front-load all the information to show users you have something they want or need. If it seems like your audience will have to dig around to find the information they need, they’ll likely just scroll past your post or bounce off your page. 

Here are some important points to consider. 

• Pique their interest by inserting target keywords in your title and meta description. 
• Speak directly to your audience—adding numbers, “how-to”, or strong adjectives in the headline will create a stronger call to action than a simple, straightforward explanatory headline. 
• For blog posts, optimize for speed and responsiveness. The best headlines cannot prevent bounce rates if your site is slow and unresponsive. 
• For your website, streamline the user experience with simple navigation that can usher them further into your available content options. 
• Focus on aesthetics—visuals are so important when you only have seconds to capture your audience’s attention. Keep your main image light on text, make headlines concise, use visually striking images, and make sure your content is responsive for various devices. 

Creating compelling content doesn’t have to be complicated. You just need to know which components will work. If you can incorporate these tips into how you craft your content, you’ll be really surprised to discover how much difference it makes for your reader’s engagement. In time, you’ll begin to see how much it boosts content quality and improves your metrics. 

If you want to find out what we can do to help you create compelling content consistently, reach out to us. Book a consultation or get started with LeadsPanda to find out how we can help you. 

For any questions, leave a comment below or check out our LinkedIn or Twitter.