The Business Case for Behavior-Changing Content: Five Rules of Engagement

The Business Case for Behavior-Changing Content: Five Rules of Engagement

The Business Case for Behavior-Changing Content: Five Rules of Engagement. Brand-produced content was up 35% in 2015, while consumer engagement with that content was down 17%, according to TrackMaven. For digital marketers, content is still one of the best ways to engage your customers, but you must rethink it: From: Beautiful stories about your brand To: High-value, behavior-changing content about and for your customers and their aspirations How to Create Content That Engages: Start With Your Customer's Journey Engaging content is content that people care about—content that gets their attention, captures their interest, and, in best-case scenarios, brings them back, time and time again. Five Rules of Engagement Rule 1: Engaging content is not beautiful messages about your brand; content that engages is high-value content that removes resistance and triggers progress along your customers' journey To create content that truly engages your customers, you must give up one of the most pervasive misconceptions about content and social media. Instead, create content about your customers and for their journey. That's not to say people never want to hear about your product. Rule 2: Customer journey + resistance and progress triggers + natural language = your evergreen message pillars Engaging content strategies also feature recurring messages that collectively do two things: They tell the big story of your customers' transformation. I call these recurring messages "message pillars" because they stay the same for long periods of time, they span your entire content program no matter the channel, and they constitute the foundation for how you or your team will execute individual content programs, campaigns, and even individual blog posts. Also think about what medium you have unique access to, such as an email list or other way of reaching your customers. So instead of us producing content about things the app couldn't help with, the product and engineering teams built a set of recipe-logging tools to make it easier for people to track food when they cooked at home.

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Most marketing conversations these days revolve around terms such as “omnichannel” and “programmatic,” or topics such as the ever-evolving social media channels and the need for brands to produce click-worthy content.

Many more conversations are waving a red flag that we’re approaching “Peak Content.” Brand-produced content was up 35% in 2015, while consumer engagement with that content was down 17%, according to TrackMaven.

For digital marketers, content is still one of the best ways to engage your customers, but you must rethink it:

  • From: Beautiful stories about your brand
  • To: High-value, behavior-changing content about and for your customers and their aspirations

How to Create Content That Engages: Start With Your Customer’s Journey

Engaging content is content that people care about—content that gets their attention, captures their interest, and, in best-case scenarios, brings them back, time and time again.

Engaging content gets shared and goes viral. It causes people to open your emails and to click on the links in them, to read your blog again and again, to click on your Facebook links, to watch your YouTube videos, to like your Instagram posts.

I could write pages and pages about how to develop engaging content strategies and optimize content for engagement. I won’t be doing that here.

But I will provide you with five principles that every engaging content strategy I’ve ever worked on, and have ever even seen, adheres to.

Five Rules of Engagement

Rule 1: Engaging content is not beautiful messages about your brand; content that engages is high-value content that removes resistance and triggers progress along your customers’ journey

To create content that truly engages your customers, you must give up one of the most pervasive misconceptions about content and social media. The goal is not to publish stories about your brand, no matter how big, beautiful, or emotional they might be. There is a short list of things people care about, and stories about your brand are not on it.

Instead, create content about your customers and for their journey.

By journey, I’m talking about their journey to improve their lives. In my Transformational Consumer Insights Study, I discovered that 50% of American consumers see life as a never-ending series of projects to live healthier, wealthier, wiser lives. They spend a great deal of their time and money on the products, services, and content that can help them make those changes.

This means that most of the content you publish should fall within a story line that either alleviates the frictions your customers are experiencing as they try to create change or inspires and excites them about the possibilities for their lives. The role you play within your customers’ stories is the role of mentor, adviser, or instrument that helps them along the way.

It also means that most of your content should be about your customers, their lives, and their issues.

That’s not to say people never want to hear about your product. It just that most of your content should…

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