How do you craft content that resonates with your audience? Just about everything that you'll need to help craft counted that counts - from facts and statistics to support your claims to whether you should use a comma or not in a particular sentence - can be found online. Constructing content that counts and resonates deeply with your audience is another matter altogether. 

In crafting resonating content what are the strategic ways to create content that is unique, actionable, keyword driven and helps your readers solve the challenges they are facing and possibly even deserving of going viral! 

Know who you’re dealing with

It’s common practice for online copywriters and marketers to think of a certain market to consider as their audience. However, you will be way ahead of the pack if you choose to be as personal as you can get. Write with a specific person in mind, a buyer persona. How does that person spend their day to day? What challenges do they encounter? What are their pain points and what information is helpful to them? Once you have figured out who you’re dealing with, it would be easier to speak their language to deliver your message succinctly. You're not going to use medical slang if you’re talking to teens battling acne, right? 

Craft valuable content

What makes your content valuable? First, it should provide specific answers to what your audience wants to learn. As much as possible, the steps given to solve a problem should have been tested to really work. Second, valuable content should be actionable. Understand that people seek information, whether online or offline, to become better. 

Make it unique and memorable by telling a story

The philosopher Bertrand Russell asserted in his 1954 book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics , that “speech, fire, agriculture, writing, tools, and large-scale cooperation” are what set humans apart from animals. However, Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals argue that it has nothing to do with agriculture, tools, speech or fire making skills, but rather our “open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on different situations, and our deep-seated drive to link our scenario-building minds together.” In short, it has to do with the human’s ability to imagine, picture the future, reflect on the past, and tell stories. 

Are you still unconvinced? Here’s what Jonathan Gottschall, author of the The Storytelling Animal has to say on Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon: 

“When we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our dukes up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless.” 

So, why not be deliberate with your “Once upon a time..”?

Above all else, aim for accuracy

Gaining your readers’ trust is crucial in building a strong relationship with your audience. This can only be achieved by aiming for 100 percent accuracy all the time with your content. Generally, a huge portion of your content creation process should be focused on fact checking and curation of resources. 

When dealing with figures and highly relevant data that support your content, taking the following steps can help ensure their authenticity: 

● Ask yourself if your source is original. If it isn’t, trace its origins. 
● Evaluate the source’s origins. Does it come from a highly respectable organization? Is the person qualified to provide such information? Is your source referenced by others? Is the research methodology thoroughly explained? 
● Be skeptical. Challenge the information by asking questions. If two or more conflicting data is present and you can’t seem to find something that will confirm the authenticity of either one of them, present both conflicts instead in your content. You can even ask for your readers’ opinion regarding the conflicting data. 

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller blamed her sources when she made a mistake in a report about weapons of mass destruction. It should be noted, however, that no amount of excuse such as Miss Miller’s will regain your reader’s trust. It is your responsibility to double check before hitting the publish button. 

Write a winning headline

According to Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. Therefore, crafting a winning headline that will urge your readers to move on to the next paragraph should be your goal when creating content that counts. 

Generally, an irresistibly clickable headline is possible through the following:
● Tap into people’s curiosity. Humans are inherently curious and will most likely take a second look on your headline if you provide new information but do not completely reveal it until the reader browses through the content. Show, don’t tell.
● Use negatives rather than positives. We have been taught since kindergarten to look on the bright side yet when it comes to writing headlines, being positive may not be a good thing. According to a 2012 study of 65,000 headlines, headlines that contain negative superlatives such as never and worst have 63 percent higher click through rate than headlines with positive superlatives like always and best. It looks like readers tend to consider negative headlines as authentic and impartial than positive headlines.
● Incorporate numbers as much as possible. Generally, people like certainty. Take, for example, the results of a study on the psychology of waiting lines. The researchers found out that people will be more relaxed and forgiving if they are informed of the exact amount of time that they should wait. The same goes for headlines. If people know how many steps, tips, or facts you will present, they won’t mind clicking the headline because they know exactly what they’re getting into. 

Engage with your audience

Do more than just inform and advise. Engage with your audiences by encouraging them to share a similar experience, how they reacted, and ask them what their personal thoughts about a topic might be.

Making content that counts is simply all about being sincere in what you do best and making sure that your audiences clearly understand the message that you want delivered, hopefully it helps solve a problem, or offer a new perspective on our to move ahead on a new topic.

How do you make your content count? Why not leave us a comment below and be the social in social media.

About the Author

 

About Kyjean Tomboc

Kyjean likes to think of herself as an online content machine but her love for all things feline makes her human after all! She writes mainly about health, science, social media, and online content marketing. If she’s not writing, she’s either scaling mountains or taming tardigrades. Follow her tardigrade taming attempts at Twitter - @autodidactikai