Getting your audience to engage with your content is critical to content marketing. There are a variety of marketing tactics you can employ now to increase your audience engagement.
Share Videos
These days no marketing tactics is complete without the use of video. Video is one of the means you can use to provide engaging content to your target audience.
This Google study, 48% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from companies whose mobile sites provide instructional video content.
And 82% of Twitter users watch video on that network.
In a study of more than 33,000 Facebook videos, Wochit found that square videos get 275% more views, 482% more shares, 523% more comments, and 349% more reactions than the average landscape video.
Facebook states that ads using the carousel format deliver a cost per click that’s 20%-30% lower than standard link ads.
When you create your video, make sure it has captions to cater to the high percentage of Facebook users who watch the video with the sound off.
If millennials are a large part of your follower base, then I suggest you share lots of videos in your content marketing approach.
Create standalone video content. You can also try repurposing existing content into video as part of your content marketing efforts.
Use Email to Promote Your Content
Looking at content marketing trends in the U.S., at least 80% of the people check their email daily and, a 2017 study by The Radicati Group, 50% of those emails are spam.
Using the data in your email marketing platform, you see the percentage of people who opened your email. You can also see what they clicked on, what kinds of offers caught their attention, and how successful your emails are at driving traffic back to your site.
Growing a mailing list that has a high conversion rate is one area you need to give your attention in digital marketing.
Cite and Link to Your Sources
To be a responsible blogger, cite and link to other bloggers acknowledging any of their ideas or stats that you have used in your content marketing program. It shows your audience that you have done proper research for your post. It will also increase audience engagement with your content.
One best practice for gaining high ranking on a search engine is through link building. If you cite and link to your sources, your audience will view your content as credible. It will increase your chances of getting much-needed backlinks.
Curate and Share Valuable Content
By curating and sharing valuable evergreen content, you will educate yourself and your community on valuable industry knowledge. It helps to build brand loyalty, establish credibility and trust. Content curation also improves brand voice and awareness.
In situations where your content creation process or your own generated content cannot meet the demands of your target audience, use content curation.
Create an Editorial Calendar for Blogging and Scheduling Posts
In this article Insideview says B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads every month versus companies that don’t.
CMI’s recent report, only 39% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
Small B2B companies that blog regularly generate up to 67% more leads monthly as compared to their competitors who don’t.
You can get 3,150% more traffic to your content by scheduling a few more social messages to share with your followers. (socialmediatoday.com)
In my personal experience, the perfect time to share content differs from one brand to another. Find the perfect time that works best for your target audience. Then use the correct call to action in your content when publishing to encourage engagement.
Write Better Headlines Using Emotional Keywords
Use headlines that appeal to people’s intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual tastes. Nailing your headlines and email subject lines is hard work. It is critical to increasing your audience engagement. Write evergreen headlines. If your headline sucks your content will not do well.
Increase Posting on Social Media
Take a look at this case study by Pepe Jeans, a global fashion brand. By improving their post frequency and creating localised content, they managed to increase comments on posts up to 70%, boosted engagement levels by 48% and reached a Facebook fan base of more than 2,000,000.
I always advice small business owners to increase posting on social media. If you cannot cope, you can outsource your social media marketing/management to Mauco Enterprises.
Use Hashtags
Use hashtags on the social network that allow it, such as Twitter and Instagram. Tweets with 1 or 2 hashtags have 21% more engagement than Tweets crowded by hashtags.
Your content strategy will fall flat if you don’t use the proper hashtags. Using trending hashtags with your social media stories and other content is a great content marketing tactics to increase your audience engagement. But, do so responsibly and ensure you relate your content to the trending hashtag. Don’t just use trending hashtags to spam your audience. It can be counter-productive to your inbound marketing.
Use Images, Infographics and Memes
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A smiley face can boost interaction by 25%, whereas a grimacing emoticon can increase engagement by 138%. Buffer says tweets that include images tend to gain 150% more retweets than tweets that don’t include them. Did you know that photos with faces get 38% more likes than those without photos?
And this content marketing survey says, 41% of marketers said they found infographics to be the most engaging type of content they used.
Use images to increase retweets. Buffer found that sharing images on Twitter increases retweets by 150%. Include a picture in every post for 35% more retweets.
This article notes that according to Wishpond, the average Facebook post gets 120% less engagement than posts that include an image.
A picture is worth a thousand words. So using pictures, infographics and memes abundantly in your blog post leads to higher engagement with your content. Using the right images in your content and social channels will enhance the user experience.
Post About Company Updates
About 1 in 3 consumers will give a brand a shoutout when posting about a milestone or accomplishment on social media.
It is why you need to focus on growing your email list. “The money is in the list” is a famous saying in the digital marketing world.
Having an extensive list of email subscribers will enable you to have a ready audience that you can reach out to when you post your company updates.
Recycle Content
I feel sad whenever I see SMB’s struggling to churn out new content regularly without maximising the use of their existing content. It’s not a crime to recycle material into other formats. These days it is one of the most creative tactics you can adopt to increase your audience engagement. A lot of influencers and companies recycle content.
Take a look at Disney for instance. They are very good at their recycling content. They create an animation, turn it into a movie, a musical, a theatre show, a series, create action figures around the characters in the film and so on. They will milk a single piece of content for all its worth!
Create or Join Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn
Groups, whether on Facebook or LinkedIn, are great places to find potential customers. They are also great places to share your content to increase audience engagement. Exercise caution so as not to go about spamming groups with your content. Ensure that you also engage with material from other members of the group. Make sure only to share great content that will help to alleviate the pain points of your target audience.
Implementing these content marketing tactics will help to boost your audience engagement and amplify your content reach. Click To TweetJoin or Host a Twitter Chat
I am a fan of Twitter chats. Some brands host awesome Twitter chats that are very educative. Engaging in Twitter chats provides you with the opportunity of meeting and following intelligent folks in your community. And if all goes well, you can also attract new followers to engage with your content too.
Hold Q&A Sessions
When was the last time you held a Q&A session with your customers? Well, this is a great tactic to increase audience engagement with your content. Find the best time that your audience will be available to participate in your Q&A sessions.
Host Contest on Social Media
Hosting contests on your social media platform is a great way to build community and a secure online following. It incentivises people to follow your brand. It also helps to build brand awareness, increase subscribers, sales and engagement with your content.
If need be, create a particular landing page for your contests. It will help to boost the click-through rate from your social media channels to your website.
Conduct Polls & Surveys
Online polls and surveys are fast and easy to deploy. They are also easy to process and display the result, and the results are more accurate. Ensure that your survey respondents come from your online communities. And use the right poll or survey for the right content types.
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Offer Incentives for Shares and Conversions
It’s no crime to offer incentives to your audience for shares and conversion, especially during influencer outreach. Remember that your audience is taking their precious time to engage with your content. So, there is nothing wrong if you show appreciation. But, digital publishers need to build a robust online audience and not a fickle audience that exists solely for the incentives they derive from engaging with your content.
Ask Followers to Engage
They say, ask, and you will receive. Therefore, if you politely ask your followers to engage with your content, they will. However, this works mainly when your audience knows that you provide amazing content worthy of their engagement. And whenever your audience engages with your content, always make sure you thank them.
Make it Easy for People to Engage
Make it easy for people to engage with your content or digital advertising, and they usually will. Do you have share and follow buttons on your blog? If your target audience is on Pinterest, have you made it easy for them to pin your content? Are they visible and easy to interact with on mobile devices? Do you have a search box on your website or any other feature that makes it easy for your audience to find your content? These are some things you need to consider.
Know Your Audience and Give Them What They Want
Knowing your audience is central to any marketing strategy. Use your audience data to create your marketing personas and build content.
Data from Google Analytics is essential to getting information on your target audience for online marketing. Create content that addresses your audience or content readers’ pain points, and your audience will engage with it. It requires that you place your fans and customers at the heart of your business.
Be Agile and Ready to Evolve
Digital marketing is dynamic. Strategies and tactics that work today may not work tomorrow. It is why you need to be agile with your marketing messages and ready to evolve. Don’t get stuck in the past. Be agile and prepared to adjust your marketing plan, content topics, and content marketing tactics whenever necessary.
Being agile and ready to evolve helps to foster audience engagement with your content.
Conduct Competitor Analysis and Work with Data
Even if you try all the ideas I have mentioned, you won’t be able to engage users on your site correctly. Unless you analyse what concepts worked and what didn’t. It is why you have to work with data and learn to conduct competitor analysis.
Focus on Quality, not Quantity
Without quality, your audience engagement will suffer much. People like to read content that answers questions. Or content that helps them with a particular situation they’re experiencing.
When using promotional tools focus on quality, not quantity when promoting any piece of content through any marketing channel.
Use Wit and Humour Where Appropriate
Depending on the theme of your content marketing and your target audience use wit and humour where appropriate. Use wit and humour in your podcast to make it enjoyable. If you schedule witty and fun-filled content for at a future date, ensure that you monitor the news and current events happening. So you do not unknowingly offend people by posting an insensitive content after a tragic incident has occurred. These are some reasons social media managers are constantly monitoring social media to keep abreast of local and international events.
Feature your Fans and Customers
Do you have loyal fans and customers that are passionate about your brand? Feature them in your content. Doing so displays your affection and appreciation for your fans and customers. It will also help to increase engagement with your content.
Go Live
Going live is a growing trend. Live streaming is cheap and takes less time to produce. It’s a great way to pass on valuable time-sensitive information. Many social media platforms encourage live streaming because it offers real-time engagement and helps in reaching highly targeted niches with valuable information.
Promote Attractive Offers
Use social ads on Instagram and Facebook to help increase the reach of your content marketing campaign.
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Content Marketing KPIs: 3 Steps to Follow to Evaluate Success
Content lays the foundation of most of the digital marketing tactics today. It can help you reach your audience, interact with them, understand them, educate them about your products and services. This will help you build trust and generate quality leads.
But, repeatedly, ask yourself if your content marketing campaign is producing satisfactory results. Measuring the right KPIs (key performance indicators) can help you track whether you’re on the right path or you need to improve your strategy. Here’s how:
1. Establish Your Goals
First things first, you need to chalk out your goals. Most businesses have several goals that they want to achieve from their content marketing campaign, and those goals often overlap. You need to rank your goals to tailor your content to meet your goals. Besides, having realistic goals will help you test your campaign’s performance in a better way. Some common content marketing objectives are:
- Increase brand awareness
- Generate leads to Drive revenue.
2. Tie Goals with Relevant KPIs
If you know what you want to gain from your campaign, you can tie each one of your goals with relevant KPIs. For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness, here are some KPIs you can track:
Site traffic: You can track the number of people visiting your website. Ideally, this number should exhibit an upward trajectory over time. Also, it will be valuable to analyze where your traffic is coming from.
Follower growth: Keep close tabs on your follower and subscriber count. If it isn’t growing organically, you may need to reassess your content strategy.
Engagement rate: Your content’s engagement rate will help you understand how your audience feels about your brand. The amount of shares and comments on your posts is a great indicator of how engaging your content is. Or, if your primary goal is to generate leads, you can track KPIs such as cost per lead and click-through rate.
3. Alter Your KPIs
Establishing KPIs is not a one-time event. The chances are that your business goals will keep evolving. Also, the world of content is ever-changing. So, it is important for marketers to alter their campaigns, goals, and KPIs accordingly.
If you’re struggling to optimize your content marketing strategy, try using a content marketing platform. These platforms can help you organize all aspects of your campaign — from ideation to production to evaluation.
For a list of some of the best platforms, you can check out the post on here. To learn more about content marketing KPIs you can track, the infographic below might help.
Infographic
Conclusion
Implement these content marketing tactics mentioned above will help to boost your engagement and amplify your reach. It will help you to stand apart from all the content marketing noise.
Do you need help with any of these content marketing tactics? Schedule a meeting. I will be glad to help.
Related Article(s)
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- How to Do Content Marketing Without Content
- Using the Content Marketing Cycle in Your Business
- Types of Content for Your Video Marketing
- How To Acquire Early Users Through Content Marketing
- Removing Proxy Albatross: Three Problems IP Data Solves for Marketers
- How to Create a Strategic Editorial Calendar
- 10 Ways to Increase Your Social Media Reach and Engagement
- 7 Ways to Maximize the Viral Potential of Your Content Marketing Efforts
- 5 Simple yet Effective Tips for Creating High-Quality Content for Your Content Marketing Strategy
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