Content Marketing Tips: 3 Simple Tools To Increase Engagement

Have you ever wanted to add data visualisations, quizzes, surveys, and infographics to your content and achieve greater engagement — in just 15 minutes? You can.

But why do this extra work? Because if creating content is hard, then creating great content is even harder. And creating content that’s engaging, that will get people talking, and will get shared like mad, well, that’s just asking for too much!

Jokes aside, content creation is among the toughest challenges facing marketing firms and agencies. According to the B2B Content Marketing survey, run by Content Marketing Institute, producing engaging content is the top challenge for content marketers in 2016.

But that’s not stopping everyone and their uncle from producing content. In 2016, 75 percent of marketers say they will produce more content than they did in 2015.

With so much content competing for eyeballs, how do you get yours to stand out? How do you increase the engagement levels of your content ?

With these three tools.

Data Visualisations with Datawrapper

Wait! Don’t leave yet! We know you’ve been told to use a dozen different data visualisation tools—and they’re all so complex that you’ve given up. We’ve been there, too.

Datawrapper is different. In four, easy steps, you will be able to create interactive graphs that look like this.

Who else uses Datawrapper? Fortune magazine, the Guardian, France’s Le Monde…impressed yet?

You don’t need to be a math genius to use Datawrapper. Here’s a two-minute video how to use it.

If you don’t have two minutes, here’s a summary.

• Step 1: Upload data
• Step 2: Check your data
• Step 3: Choose your chart type, select the colours you want to use, put in the title and description
• Step 4: Publish

It’s really that simple.

Once you’ve mastered Datawrapper (we promise, it will take all of 15 minutes), you will be able to produce interactive graphs.

Datawrapper gives you multiple options to publish.

• The Boring Option: You can create an image. Download it and paste it into your CMS. But because it’s an image, it won’t have any interactivity.
• The Unnecessarily Complex Option: Download your chart as fully self-contained website. Just unpack the archive and upload the folder to a webserver to host the chart yourself.
• The Best Option: Take an embed code, paste it on your CMS, and be done.

Does it cost? Downloading your chart as a fully self-contained website (option two) is free.

But if you want to use an embed code or an image, you have to pay. It’s €12 for a month.

The good news: Once you’ve paid, and used the service to make your visualisations, you don’t have to keep paying. Your chart will be usable in perpetuity. And they will be mobile compatible.

Do you really need data visualisation? Yup, you do. According to research data visualisation, can increase comments and shares by between 16-34 percent. It can add 65-100 percent more to your average session duration and improve depth of scroll by 317 percent!

But here’s the clincher: According to one study, translating data into visuals can help businesses grow traffic by 12 percent. Read more about that.

Quizzes and Surveys with Apester

Apester’s tagline is: Make Your Content Roar! And it sure does that—without making it hard for content creators.

Apester makes it simple to create quizzes and surveys. All you have to do is drag and drop images, add your questions, and hit publish.

You can use Apester to create quizzes, surveys, single-question polls, and videos in which you can embed quizzes or polls.

Here are some examples of what an Apester quiz looks like:

• You Think You Know Your Customer? Test Your CX IQ
• QUIZ: Which Sports Era Do You Belong In?
• This Is The Most Difficult ‘Star Wars’ Quiz You Will Ever Take

Who else uses Apester? Plenty of well-known media and publishing brands. The list includes The Huffington Post, the Telegraph, TimeOut, and USA Today, among others.

Apester’s interface can be a little unintuitive to use, but it makes up for it in simplicity.

After making your quiz, Apester gives you the option of downloading embedded links for iframes, HTML 5, and WordPress. And its quizzes and surveys are mobile compatible.

Does it cost? Nopes, Apester is free.

Infographics with Piktochart

What’s the hard part about making an infographic? The hours you have to spend with a designer—if you can get one—thinking up ways to share your ideas in a visual form.

Piktochart helps you get around that problem. It has over 500 ready-made templates that you could use straightaway. It also gives you the option of tinkering around (quite a lot) with its templates.

That said, creating infographics is a little harder than building a quiz or a data visualisations,—so be prepared to spend a little more than 15 minutes learning this tool.

By being able to look at potential end-products, it becomes much easier to backward integrate your content to fit a certain form. Best case scenario, you find a template that is exactly what you need and all you have to do is input text. Even if you can’t Piktochart gives you the ability to tweak colours, textures, lines, boxes and images to fit your message.

Check out this two-minute tutorial to create your first infographic.

A Piktochart feature we found amazing is the in-built capability to create charts and data-maps.

When you’re done creating an infographic, Piktochart will give you a shareable link or an embed code that you can place on your website or CMS.

Who else uses Piktochart? Forbes, The Guardian, and TechCrunch, among others in the publishing world. It’s also used in businesses like Booking.com and SurveyMonkey.

Does it cost? Partially. Piktochart has about a dozen free templates. It’s Lite plan costs about $15 a month, and its pro-plan is $29 a month.

Now it’s your turn. Do you have a list of easy-to-use tools that can make content sing? We want to hear about them.