What are your strategies for increasing engagement on your digital marketing content?

Engagement in digital content is first and foremost about making that content valuable to your audience. You also have to understand who the audience of that content is and define what "engagement" means for that audience. As an example if I have my team write a whitepaper that is exclusively for when our AE's get in front of a CEO I'm not going to measure the quantity of views or uses I'm going to connect with the AEs and get qualitative input to measure the quality of the paper and how it was received. That said, there's a few tried and true strategies I can share along with some tips on how to implement them.

1. Tailor Content to Audience Needs and Pain Points

As I said above, one of the key elements in driving engagement is creating content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and challenges. For example, Docker’s content is highly focused on the inner loop of cloud-native development, addressing pain points around developer productivity, security, and scalability.

Actionable Tip: Conduct audience segmentation to deeply understand the pain points of your key personas. Use this insight to create tailored content—case studies, tutorials, whitepapers—that offers immediate, actionable value to them. When content directly solves their problems, engagement naturally follows.

2. Use Interactive and Visual Content

We've all heard it before, people have different methods of learning and consuming information. I have a friend who taught himself to golf by watching YouTube video, I improved my game reading a book about it. For that same reason, developers and decision-makers respond well to visual and interactive content, such as demos, video tutorials, and infographics. At Docker we often rely on technical demos, product walkthroughs, and visual guides to showcase how our solutions streamline developer workflows and enhance productivity.

Actionable Tip: Incorporate interactive elements into your digital content, such as quizzes, code sandboxes, or live demos. Create video content that breaks down complex topics, as these formats tend to get higher engagement due to their hands-on nature.

3. Leverage Thought Leadership and Educational Content

In the B2B SaaS space, content that positions your brand as an industry thought leader can drive engagement. For Docker, this might include blog posts on security best practices, insights into cloud-native development trends, or deep dives into tools like Testcontainers Cloud. Educational content builds trust, helping you establish credibility and authority, which increases engagement.

Actionable Tip: Make the time to prioritize this content. It is really easy to to think you're meeting your audiences needs by creating a bunch of smaller surface area pieces but many will benefit much more strongly from deep analyses and well thought out, and explained, insights. Webinars, eBooks, and technical deep dives can be very engaging if they provide knowledge that helps solve real-world problems.

4. Implement Data-Driven Personalization

Personalizing content based on user behavior and preferences is a powerful way to boost engagement. This doesn't have to be via advance, and expensive, tools; you can simply identify your most engaged cohorts and start creating content for them. Round robin through those cohorts and eventually you'll stumble on a handful that are highly active. Though lots of tools do come with personalization baked in, e.g. in Marketo we send certain nurtures based on engagement with certain web pages and content.

Actionable Tip: Use your website! Many tools can trigger campaigns or cohort users based on the content they're consuming. Leverage this data to deliver personalized experiences, such as recommending content based on their past engagement or suggesting features tailored to their role (e.g., individual developers vs. enterprise teams).

5. Create a Seamless Content Journey

This one is huge, I probably should have put it earlier. Engagement isn’t just about individual pieces of content but how the overall user journey is structured. Build out your content in ways where it builds on past pieces, link them together, build a relationship with your audience over time, don't expect one piece to do all the lifting.

Actionable Tip: Design your content strategy to guide users from one piece of content to the next logically. For example, a user might start with a white paper, then a video, then a blog post, then move to a product demo, and then download a whitepaper. Use calls-to-action (CTAs) that lead them naturally down the funnel.

6. Incorporate Community and User-Generated Content

Fostering a sense of community is key to long-term engagement. Encouraging user-generated content (UGC) and community interactions around your product can deepen engagement.

Actionable Tip: Build a strong community around your brand, encouraging users to contribute to forums, share success stories, or participate in discussions. Highlight UGC, whether it's tutorials, case studies, or feedback, to increase trust and engagement with your content.

7. A/B Test and Optimize Content

I've done this for a long time and it's been incredibly valuable. Now I see even influencers A/B testing, trying out different types of content, different times, or different treatments until they figure out what works best for their audience. Continuous improvement is essential in any digital strategy.

Actionable Tip: Regularly A/B test different types of content, headlines, and formats to understand what drives the most engagement. Use these learnings to refine your content strategy and ensure it evolves with your audience's preferences.