Why engagement is key to building lasting relationships

Brands are built on relationships. If you’re not developing real, meaningful relationships with your prospects and customers, you’re going to have a tough time achieving and maintaining success.

The challenge is that engaging with your audience—and keeping them engaged over time—is harder than ever. While people are consuming more content online year over year, there’s been a huge increase in the amount of digital content available from brands, publishers, and peers.

In order to stand out from the clutter, brands have to invest in creating content that’s more relevant, interesting, and unique than anything else out there. This is no easy task, but there are a few proven best practices when it comes to developing relationship-enriching content.

The power of visuals

Visual storytelling has been taking off in a big way over the past few years, and is a great way to drive connection with your audience. There’s a reason that most web content is becoming more visual: humans respond to images much faster than text because of the way the brain is designed.

elling your brand stories with visuals can help you evoke an immediate emotional response from your audience.

It’s also much easier to catch someone’s attention with a powerful image than it is with text-only content. When a casual content consumers scrolls through a site, only half paying attention, an eye-catching visual can make them pause and go back to investigate.

Interactivity and audience participation  

Hooking in your audience with powerful visuals can help you gain their attention, but keeping that attention requires highly compelling, immersive content.

Marketers are starting to incorporate interactive content into their strategies to drive sustained engagement with prospects throughout their journey. They’re finding that interactivity breaks down the barriers between brands and consumers.

With interactivity, content consumption is no longer a passive task—it requires active participation.

You can have the greatest infographic, article, or whitepaper in the world, but if it’s static, you’re missing a major opportunity to build relationships because consumers can’t connect with you through the content.

In an interactive piece of content, viewers play a key role in your story rather than just watching it unfold.

Interactive content also provides valuable insight into how consumers engage with your content  by showing which topics and objects they drilled into with and where they spent time inside individual pieces of content.

Designing touchpoints for conversation

Great content provides a platform for conversation between you and your audience. Like any good conversation, you want it to be two-sided. This means inviting viewers to provide feedback, and providing them with a neutral (e.g. non-salesy) platform to do so.

This advice applies to your content marketing efforts across the board.

Every touchpoint needs to invite the viewer to participate in a conversation with your brand—not just learn more about your products and services.

Conclusion

Capturing someone’s attention online is extremely difficult, and holding it long enough to begin a real relationship is a universal challenge every marketer faces.

Developing content that encourages active participation from your audience will not only encourage your prospects and customers to engage with you—it’ll also create a more positive perception of your brand and marketing team.

This kind of approach has a positive impact on engagement, loyalty, and customer advocacy, which ultimately will drive positive results for your brand.