The life of a marketer is dominated by marketing engagement. We count likes, retweets, shares, comments, back links and website visits 24/7 and crave for that one viral post to catapult the brand to recognition. Even once you achieve impressive engagement the challenge of maintaining the hype and fan fare presents itself. Hopefully you've identified the content your audience wants to read. Now let's explore some methods for giving it the engagement potential it deserves.
Where is your content going?
You could have an earth shattering piece of content, but if you're not driving it to readers who can meaningfully engage with it, you may as well have written it in Latin. Kudos to writing a fantastic article, but do more.
- Do you have a content calendar? Make sure you have planned social posts linking to it!
- Are you monitoring discussion boards and forums? Those talking about the subject matter and asking relevant questions are likely to engage with an article that gives answers and acts like a resource.
- Have you been keeping an eye on your influencers? Where are they? Don't waste time on Facebook if your key audience is addicted to Twitter.
Fernando Labastida wrote an article, 10 Ways to Get into the Content Marketing 38%, for Content Marketing Institute. He explains, "The problem? Content saturation. Companies are producing content in massive quantities, creating a mountain of material that doesn't get read because nobody knows about it."
What is your call to action (CTA)?
Engagement is a lot easier if you simply tell your readers what to do. If you want them to comment, ask them to! If you want the content shared, why not incentivize it and make it fun? Too often marketers create content for no particular audience with no particular purpose. No wonder it's not getting the engagement you had expected.
There's asking the reader to take action, and then making it as easy for them as clicking a button. Some people, like Shelby Clarke, spend a significant amount of time creating CTA buttons to increase marketing engagement. Shelby's Business 2 Community article, The 3 Main Functions of a Call-to-Action, is a great read for buffing up your CTA acumen.
"I think it's a great idea to always have one open space for those CTAs that focus on social sharing. A lot of sites use these to show you which of your friends support their business, and often encourage you to share their blog content right within the blog itself," she suggests.
Trial and Error isn't just for Science Labs
Please don't give-up on content marketing or social media if you don't get stellar results right away, or even after a few weeks of a new campaign. There is only so much predicting you can do to anticipate the engagement your content will receive. The only way to have a basis of comparison is to generate a repertoire of materials to measure.
To revisit Fernando Labastida's article, "Use content to gauge whether you're on the right track, then go back to the drawing board if you must."
Rough drafts become final drafts after tweaks, rewrites and extensive edits. The same applies to coming up with a high performing content marketing strategy. Some lucrative items to test out:
- Email marketing: Have you been A/B testing your subject lines to test open rates? What about the layout to analyze click through rates?
- Landing pages: Are you sharing them across all your social channels to find your audience saturation? What about layout? Does certain formatting render more completions?
- Blog posts: Which subjects receive the most comments? And which ones are shared the most?
Keep these questions and tips in mind and you'll be well on your way to not only increased marketing engagement, but a more complete portrait of your ideal prospect.