What really drives content engagement? (Hint: It’s not just more content)

Google any topic and you’ll find a flood of information vying for your attention, a mix of articles, links, ads, and AI-generated overviews. But search doesn’t stop with Google anymore. You can also ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or another AI engine for answers. For almost every topic, there is a seemingly endless amount of content available.

This presents new challenges for brands. Creating content is no longer enough to attract customers. They already have access to more information than they can consume. To capture and keep consumers’ attention, brands must focus on increasing content engagement. 

In this article, you’ll see how leading brands use digital experience platforms, structured content, and AI-driven personalization to create engaging content at scale across channels, products, and the entire user journey.

What is content engagement?

When we think about engagement, we usually consider key metrics like repeat customers, customer referrals, the number of followers or subscribers on social media, email open rates, and how often a customer visits our site, opens the app, or interacts with the brand in some way.

Content engagement is a component of engagement that looks at how users engage with specific pieces of content. Each action a user takes moves them forward on their journey and offers trackable moments or signals that provide valuable insights marketers can use to guide visitors to take the desired action. 

Analyzing content engagement and using that data to personalize content creates a dialogue between a visitor and a brand. It helps you capture and hold their attention so you can turn visitors into customers and customers into fully engaged fans.

Why is content engagement important?

With so much content available, people need a reason to choose your content over a competitor's or an answer from the latest AI tool. Providing information isn’t enough. People need to feel a connection with your brand.

This was one reason Kraft-Heinz reinvented its approach to consumer engagement. The food giant shifted from strictly pushing product information to focusing on personal connections, and increased engagement by over 30% for some brands.

Increasing content engagement helps brands:

• Cut through the noise: A catchy headline, quirky fact, or imagery tailored to your target audience’s interests and location can help capture a reader’s attention as they scroll through human- and AI-generated content.

• Engage potential customers: According to emailTooltester, it takes up to 50 touchpoints to make a sale. Every piece of content is an opportunity to create meaningful engagement that moves customers toward the next step.

• Build loyalty: Surfacing the right content at the right time, tailored to each target audience, builds trust and customer loyalty. 

• Extend their reach: Content engagement is a factor in search and social algorithms. Sites with high bounce rates are penalized, and social media posts with likes and shares are rewarded with greater visibility.

• Learn more about their users. The more users engage with your content, the more data you can collect. Tracking engagement and using that data to guide content creation enables you to continuously improve audience engagement metrics.

Personalization is the key to increasing content engagement

To survive in this infinite information era, brands need to create more content, but they also need that content to be useful and relevant. This comes from personalization.

Personalization is how brands contextualize content to produce rich, engaging experiences. Take Ruggable, for example. Using Contentful to create dynamic, personalized experiences helped them make buying a rug more engaging and fun, while driving results: a 7× increase in click-through rates and a 25% boost in conversions. Read the full case study.

To effectively increase content engagement, personalization needs to:

• Be data-driven, so we can iterate on learnings and then apply continuous optimization.

• Work seamlessly across multichannel/omnichannel experiences.

• Talk to people in their own language, drawing on real-time information to mimic human-to-human interactions.

• Go deeper than superficial personalization to provide timely, relevant content tailored to individuals.

How to measure content engagement for continuous optimization

Good data is the key to improving audience engagement. Combining engagement metrics — time spent on page, likes, shares, click-through rates, and form completion — with the rest of your data and using that to drive content creation creates an infinite loop. 

Measuring content engagement provides data that you can use to improve content engagement, creating an infinite loop.

What data do you need to measure content engagement effectively?

First, you need to understand how content is performing. This very much aligns with your business metrics. It could be click-through rates, conversions, the number of times someone downloads an ebook, or how many shares a post gets.

Second, you need to understand the audience data. Performance data might be high for one audience but low for another. Understanding these nuances in audience behavior can improve segmentation, allowing you to show different audiences different experiences to increase their engagement. 

Then, to really optimize your content, you need the ability to analyze content performance at the component level. How do specific content entries, like a hero image or tagline, work across channels or across pages? This is where structured content comes into play. It provides more granular data so you can create more engaging content.

When you combine good data with structured content, you can personalize content more effectively and feed better context into AI systems.

How AI is powering personalized experiences customers expect

Delight customers and drive revenue with the next phase of personalization

Overcoming challenges to ship highly personalized content at scale

Getting clean data 

Getting clean data is the most important challenge brands need to overcome. Without the right data, you’re likely to serve people the wrong content, which can detract from their experiences and lower engagement.

Solution: To ensure accurate, consistent personalization, you need a single source of truth that enables progressive profiling where data from multiple systems is unified under one profile.

Connecting data to content in real or near real time

Everything on the web happens fast, and people expect personalization to keep up. They expect the headlines, hero images, and CTAs on your landing page to match the personalized ad they saw on mobile. And the bar for website content personalization keeps getting higher, with brands using data to weave tailored navigation, featured products, and blog posts into a highly personalized experience.

Solution: Choose content and personalization solutions that can activate your customer data instantly and bring everything you need together in one place. See how Contentful helps brands connect customer data with content.

Consistency across channels

Encouraging people to click on an ad, follow you on social media platforms, or download an app is just one point of engagement. 

To increase sales and build loyalty, brands need to delight customers with engaging content that works together from one touchpoint to the next. The challenge is applying data quickly and consistently across channels to create seamless experiences.

Solution: You need seamless integration on the back end to make personalization work across channels on the front end. Contentful does this with a composable architecture that makes it easy to connect all the tools you need.

Managing highly personalized content at scale

Content marketing teams manage multiple channels, campaigns, and products, translate and localize content for different regions, and personalize content for multiple audiences. The sheer volume of content variants is overwhelming.

Solution: This is where personalization gives brands an edge, enabling even small teams to personalize content at scale. For example, at Docusign, a team of three ran personalized home page experiences for 20 different audience segments, and they’re just getting started.

See how Contentful helps Docusign personalize content for every market — with no extra work.

This sounds like a lot: How do I get started?

No one reaches Amazon- or Netflix-level personalization overnight. The important thing is to get started. 

I recently recorded a crash course in setting up a scalable personalization strategy. You can watch the personalization playbook now or read on for a few tips that will help you achieve personalization success.

To get started, focus on personalizing a few impactful experiences for high-value audiences. This will provide a faster return on investment than trying to create thousands of personalized experiences at once.

Use AI tools to help. Digital marketing teams already manage an enormous amount of content. AI-powered solutions like Contentful Personalization take the guesswork and repetitive tasks off their plates by analyzing content data, suggesting audience segments, and generating variants.

Talk to an expert at Contentful. We’d love to show you how Contentful integrates all the pieces so you can ship personalized, engaging experiences at scale without stress.

Take a tour

Chat with our team

Your experiences should wow, not wait. Let's talk.

Inspiration for your inbox

Subscribe and stay up-to-date on best practices for delivering modern digital experiences.