So, for example, if you have a business goal of improving the customer experience, a key KPI might be the rate of customer service issues that are handled—via different channels like social media, email, and your website. Target Personas, Not Demographics Where a lot of digital marketing blogs focus on a specific niche, MarketingLand covers the gamut without sacrificing its position on most “Best Digital Marketing Blogs” lists. Their audience is digital marketers, but each post clearly speaks to a specific persona: social media marketers, search engine marketers, etc. Hone Your Social Sharing Tactics Think beyond your own social media channels when it comes to social sharing, which means focusing on ways to encourage readers to share with their own audiences. Format images for social media. One of the most powerful ways to get your content shared and re-shared across social media is to attach a high-impact image specially formatted for social sharing. Encourage readers to share your content on social media by making it as simple as possible. Most successful content marketers share enough about themselves or their brand so that their audience can relate. Popular blog, The Social Media Examiner, poses a question at the end of each of their blogs to encourage reader engagement on the topic. Most of all, pay attention to how and why people engage with them and apply these lessons to your own content marketing strategy.
In the world of content marketing, it’s inescapable: Success comes down to engagement.
You can have thoughtful branding, great products, and a hard-working team, but if you’re not engaging your buyers through each step of the customer lifecycle, you’ll never reach your full potential. Simply put, without engagement, a key component of your marketing strategy will be missing: your audience.
How do successful content marketers engage in today’s information age? They never lose sight of the fact that their prospects and customers are their biggest assets. For more specific answers, let’s take a look at some of the top digital marketing blogs and highlight five lessons that will make your content more engaging:
1. Set Engagement Objectives
First, as in most marketing tasks, you need to define success. You’ll never really know (or will be able to prove to management) that you’ve created “engaging” content unless you define what “engaging” looks like. The Content Strategist suggests an inverted approach to identifying engagement objectives:
Ultimately, it helps to work backwards from business goals to determine content objectives, before listing KPIs [Key Performance Indicators], to measure whether those objectives are being met.
So, for example, if you have a business goal of improving the customer experience, a key KPI might be the rate of customer service issues that are handled—via different channels like social media, email, and your website. Once you have outlined your engagement goals and objectives, as well as the metrics to monitor them, you can map those goals with your content marketing strategy.
Aligning content topics and general content goals with your engagement objectives will help keep your content focused and reveal any gaps where there is no content to support an objective.
2. Target Personas, Not Demographics
Where a lot of digital marketing blogs focus on a specific niche, MarketingLand covers the gamut without sacrificing its position on most “Best Digital Marketing Blogs” lists.
There are several reasons (hello, big, bright visuals), not the least of which is a clear targeting of various personas. Their audience is digital marketers, but each post clearly speaks to a specific persona: social media marketers, search engine marketers, etc. That focus encourages engagement by allowing the content to speak to its audience with specialized language and a baseline understanding. To the reader, that translates as authority, and it’s much more engaging. The focus on marketing personas also helps organize the site’s menu structure. Because MarketingLand covers a variety of niches, their main navigation distinguishes those areas.
Outline a content strategy for your editorial calendar that focuses on your various personas. Then, keep the language and theme focused based on the personas(s) you’re developing content for.
3. Hone Your Social Sharing Tactics
Think beyond your own social media channels when it comes…
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