Writing content people care about is all about making emotional connections.

This notion often gives people a bit of ‘the fear’. They assume they have to make people cry with empathy or wheeze with laughter for their content to be valuable. While this is great if you can do it and it works for your business, it definitely isn’t necessary.

Instead, making emotional connections with your audience is about getting on their level. It means talking about what they want to hear, using language they use, and tapping into the problems they may be facing.

If you can do those things, you’re far more likely to create content that people care about rather than content that falls by the wayside.

To help you make emotional connections with your audience through your content, we thought we’d put a list of our top tips together – you’re welcome!

 

Writing Content People Care About

Know your audience

It may sound obvious, but you can’t make an emotional connection with someone you know nothing about. It can be tempting to treat your target audience as one entity, but it’s important to remember that it’s made up of real people with collective wants and needs.

To really get to know your audience before you begin creating content, there are a few things you should do:

  • Create personas – creating personas is all about getting to know the wants and needs of your target audience, as well as things like common pain points, behaviours and demographics. Creating personas helps bring members of your target audience to life, better allowing you to tap into their emotions when creating content.
  • Research keywords – once your personas are established, it’s important to find out what your target audience is talking about. If they’re facing a particular issue, this will have emotions attached to it. Use keyword research to determine what these issues are and create content that provides solutions.

Knowing your audience in this way provides you with valuable information that you can tap into in your content, helping to make those emotional connections that will mean people care about the content you’re producing.

Get on their level

Being on the same level as your target audience allows you to address them as peers rather than as someone you’re preaching to.

To ensure you’re conversing at the right level, consider the following:

  • The language you use – make sure you know how your target audience speaks. If they wouldn’t use industry-specific jargon in day-to-day conversation, you shouldn’t either. This will ensure that the language you use is familiar to your target audience. They’ll feel comfortable reading your content, it’ll feel like they’re having a conversation with you, and you’ll make an emotional connection.
  • The tone you use – similarly to how you’ll be using language that is familiar to your target audience, it’s also best to use a tone they can connect with. If you’re writing for serious CEOs, this will be reflected in your tone. You’ll steer clear of colloquialisms and keep humour to a minimum. If you were writing for teenagers, however, you’d take a completely different approach. Determining your tone is vital when it comes to creating content people will care about.
  • The topic you focus on – as we mentioned earlier, the topic you focus on can have a significant impact when it comes to creating emotional connections with your target audience. If you’re talking about things that aren’t on their radar, they’re going to find it difficult to care.
  • Your positioning in the content – using personal or collective pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘we’ can help it to feel like you and your target audience are on the same level. They give your content that conversational feel and remind them that this is one human being providing information to another human being, rather than a text providing information to a reader.

Getting on the same level as your target audience makes it far easier to establish emotional connections and thus produce content people actually care about.

top tips for writing content people care about

Provide Valuable Content

Now you know how to write your content, it’s time to focus on the actual information you provide.

It’s one thing to present your readers with facts and statistics, but to ensure they can make a connection with what you’re saying, it needs to hold some value for them. Consider how the information you’ve laid out for them will benefit them. Will it improve an aspect of their lives? Will it allow them to develop their knowledge or skills?

By making it clear how the information they’re consuming will impact them, you’re ensuring that you’re giving your readers a reason to care about what you’re saying.

If the information holds no value for them, they’ll find it challenging to take it in.

Choose to include information that answers the questions of your readers or addresses the specific pain points you will have identified when conducting target audience research.

Appeal to their emotions

Making an emotional connection requires you to appeal to your readers’ emotions. Sounds obvious, we know, but you’d be surprised at how many pieces of content are void of feeling!

To appeal to emotions, you need to have an understanding of emotions themselves and which ones to target when it comes to content:

  • Fear – we’re not talking about scaring your readers with ghost stories, but you do want them to fear missing out on the information you’re providing. Fear is a powerful emotion, and the fear of missing out on something drives people to engage with what they think they’re missing out on. To appeal to this feeling, use titles like ’10 things you need to know…’ or ‘Are you making these mistakes?’.
  • Belonging – the feeling of belonging to a particular group or being understood will also help you to make emotional connections through your content. No one wants to feel like they’re alone with their problems, so showing that you and the rest of your target audience share in them creates a community feel and encourages engagement.
  • Pride – feeling proud of something you’ve achieved is a huge mood booster. You can tap into this emotion of your readers by providing them with information that will aid their self-improvement in some way. For example, providing them with knowledge that will allow them to complete a particular task successfully will give them a sense of accomplishment. They will have made an emotional connection to the content you’re provided and will likely come back for more.

Tapping into your readers’ emotions makes the relationship between them and your business feel more personal, and they’ll be far more inclined to invest in what you’re offering.

top tips for writing content people care about

Content People Care About at The Edwards Company

Here at The Edwards Company, we write content that people care about.

Whether it’s producing regular blog articles, website content or content for newsletters, connecting with your target audience comes first. We’ll undertake extensive research to get to know your readers before creating content designed to appeal to them specifically.

If you’re looking to make better connections with your target audience over the coming months, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Our flexible, affordable content creation packages are designed to support businesses like yours.