Most marketing discussions today revolve around topics like “omnichannel,” “programmatic,” the ever-evolving Social Media channels, and the need for brands and their content to be clickable.
A growing number of conversations is a warning sign that we are approaching “Peak Content.” TrackMaven reports that brand-produced content increased by 35% in 2015. Consumer engagement with this content decreased by 17%.
Content is one of the most effective ways for digital marketers to engage their customers. But it would be best if you rethought this strategy:
You can find beautiful stories about your brand
You can create high-value content that will change your customers’ behavior.
Start with your customer’s journey to produce engaging content
Engaging content will grab your audience’s attention, hold their interest, and, in the best-case scenario, bring them back repeatedly.
Engaging content is shared and becomes viral. This encourages people to open and click links in your emails, read your blog repeatedly, connect your Facebook links, watch your YouTube videos, and like your Instagram posts.
I could write pages and pages on how to create engaging content strategies and optimize content for engagement. This is not the place for me to do that.
You will find five fundamental principles in every successful content strategy I have worked on or seen.
Five Rules of Engagement
Engaging content does not mean beautiful messages about your company; the content of high value eliminates resistance and triggers progression along your customer’s journey.
You must let go of one of the most common misconceptions regarding content and social media to create content that engages your audience. No matter how beautiful, emotional, or big the stories are, they’re not about your brand. Stories about your brand do not make the list.
Create content for your customers’ journey and about them.
When I say journey, I mean their journey to better their lives. In my Transformational Customer Insights study, I found that half of American consumers view life as an endless series of projects aimed at living a healthier, wealthier, and wiser lifestyle. They invest a lot of time and money in products, services, and content to help them achieve their goals.
It means that most of your content should be based on a story that either eases the friction your customers experience as they attempt to make a change or inspires and excites them about their future. You can be a mentor, advisor, or an instrument in your customer’s stories.
This also means most of your content will be about your clients, their lives, and their problems.
It’s not that people don’t want to know about your product. Most of your content needs to be high-quality, beautifully executed content that helps people in their transformational journeys. Your product will facilitate this implicitly or explicitly.
Customer journey + resistance triggers and progress triggers + Natural language = Your evergreen message pillars
Recurring messages are also part of engaging content strategies, and they do two things collectively:
Your customers’ transformation is reflected in the images.
Your brand or product is implied in their statements.
These recurring messages are message pillars-pillars” by me because they remain the same over long periods, they cover your entire content program, no matter what the channel is, and they form the basis for how your team or you will implement individual content programs, campaign, and even blog posts.
Each message pillar must be mapped back to a meaningful stage of your customer’s journey or to a significant category of things that make them feel stuck and unstuck.
They can be values, beliefs, or declarations. But they should also reflect the broader vision of your business. Consider your message pillars to be a sort of manifesto for your content channels. Use them to decide what content you will create.
Business objectives + micro-moments = what content to place where and when
The micro-moments you identify will help you to understand where your customers go online to achieve their goals. This allows you to set the appropriate content at the right time and place to reach your customers.
Each piece of content or content campaign should be based on three fundamental elements: format, medium, and substance.
It must be a medium that you can access and where your customers will be able to consume the content. Think about the mediums you can only access, like an email list or another way to reach your customers.
The format should be optimized for the content, such as rich pins for blog posts or blog posts for roundups of recipes.
Should be able to solve the frictions your customers experience. It should support specific business objectives and be produced in line with your brand’s voice and storytelling principles.
Ongoing listening + real-time content-performance data = engagement marketing
When the Customer Journey Map is completed, customer research and online listening do not end. Make them a regular practice. All content marketing should be treated as lean marketing. Build a discipline to monitor how audiences engage with each piece.
Do more of what works and less of the rest. Your teams can quickly innovate new content and programs if you can identify any natural language patterns.
Product content = R&D
Our content program at MyFitnessPal has reached some impressive milestones in customer engagement – and fast. By January of the following year, we had 10 million unique readers and 50 million pageviews. The app’s number of users in a week increased by 22%, and the number who used it during a month increased by 24%.
We reactivated around 500,000 users a week with just content.
The most exciting thing about this process was aligning every team within the company around the same customer experience. Instead of producing content that the app could not help with, our product and engineering teams created a set of recipe-logging tools for people to easily track their food at home. They made restaurant-logging software to help users track their meals (and meet their nutrition goals) while eating out. The business development team also spearheaded partnerships with restaurant data sources and menus.