How to get people to engage with your content

Published in

Confab Social

5 min readMay 11, 2016

When I received the invitation to attend Ellen’s content workshop I didn’t even think about it. Working in digital communications, there is always a reason to talk about content and our mantra at Glass is that there is always something to learn.

So what happens when you bring a bunch of creatives, in to a brightly coloured room and stick a sharpie in their hand… Ellen is delivering a keynote at UX London to an audience of 60 people and wanted to test a few larger group tactics on people ahead of the show. One of which teleported me right back to primary school and surprisingly worked incredibly well; remember hands up, fingers on lips? Ellen didn’t go the full hog with the fingers on lips but by putting her hand up and participants following suit, the room was quiet and focussed back on Ellen within seconds.

Ellen de Vries is a content strategist, brand messaging maker and language pernickety working in Brighton. She is on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary complexity — and one of her attempts was educating us at this content strategy workshop hosted by Clearleft.

What is a Content Strategist?

A content strategist can have a host of responsibilities, all the way through the process from brief to publication. Crafting content is a whole umbrella of tasks including (but not limited to) auditing, discovering audience, voice, content planning, the list goes on. For this workshop we boiled down the ecosystem and took focus on messaging. Where, if not worked on, the essence of the brand can be lost. Without clear, consistent messaging, stories — one of the most powerful tools for social media & communications — can be lost and multiple campaigns can seem arbitrary to the brand.

The tone of the messaging is important, as is the language used. Ellen walked us through a project she’d been working on where multiple words were being used to identify one thing. The core message was being lost in the confusion of what this “thing” was.

For instance when you’re talking about company culture, for the agency you’re working for and the fact that it’s a great business… Ellen says stop and puts the magnifying glass on individual words.

Making the decision that you work for an ‘agency’ and that this is the how everyone is going to refer to your agency moving forward will instantly smooth out internal & external communications. The attention to individual words can apply to your overall branding, individual projects and products.

Once we had our Content Strategist hats on, Ellen led us in a three pronged task attack.

Task 1 — Affinity Audiences

Ellen’s approach questioned who are the current users?; Made us explore our ideal user and then deeper into the persona of our ideal user. We painted a picture of an ideal user, their fears, environment, brand affinity etc.

Ellen then fed us 5 golden questions.

- What are they skeptical about in relation to what you offer?
- What problems do they have in relation to the thing you’re offering?
- Why have they not been using it before?
- What’s different now that you’ve come along with your ‘thing’?
- Paint a picture of their life now that they’ve happily worked with/listened to you?

And then a cheeky, but important 6th question…

- What should the person do next?

Task 2 — A Brand Language Mood Board

You may have seen people draw up mood boards for imagery, or even been subjected to someone’s ‘wedding pinterest’ so you’ll have an understanding of what a “mood board” is. But, here’s the twist: we did it with words.

When crafting your brand messaging, it can be helpful to look at the language used by peers, competitors and any one working in a similar space. Highlight phrases you like, words that are overused and jargon-y and circle strong messaging that fits your brand.

Ellen provided us with an un-branded language mood board, which we dissected based purely on the language used. This was a really intriguing exercise. The text was all the same font, with no indication of the company it related to. Therefore we were unswayed whereas had some of these phrases been accompanied by a Unicef logo or similar, we would have evoked a reaction before we digested the content.

This task really hit home the importance of language and how words should be able to stand up on their own.

Task 3 — Brand archetypes

This was a really fun, make-you-think part of the activities. When given a collection of archetypes (from Lovers to Magicians), thinking about your brand, which identities fit? Can you get a list of 24 archetypes down to 5. Then can you get it down to 2.

Try it.