“Content is the king.”
“It is the most important thing for business marketing today.”
“You cannot succeed in the game of marketing unless you leverage the power of content.”
All these have become more of a cliché than anything else today.
Yes, content is important for marketing. But is it enough to create world-class content?
No, certainly not. No matter how good and effective the content is, it is of no use unless spread on the right channels to boost user engagement.
Unfortunately, this is where the majority of content marketers miss the boat.
In this post, we are going to share some of the easiest content marketing tactics that will help you boost audience engagement and leverage the power of your content in the most effective manner.
So, let us take a look…
The concept of buyer personas
When writing content, you need to remember the fundamental principle – you are writing for a specific someone.
Who is this someone? Is it a teenager? A corporate officer? A middle-aged man? What are his or her preferences?
You need to build a buyer persona and then create a killer content copy based on that persona.
Unless you know the person with whom you are trying to engage, how can you draft copy that will entice him or her?
This is the reason that understating the concept of buyer personas has become the need of the hour to boost user engagement.
Some of the important factors to consider when developing buyer personas:
- Demography
- Age
- Gender
- Qualification
- Area of work
- Relationship status
Writing genuine content
There is a difference between writing content and writing content to engage your audience.
You might be wondering what this difference is. Well, the difference lies in whether you have a genuine interest in what you’re writing about.
Remember, your community will come to you searching for the solution to their problems. It is up to you to create valuable content that provides a solution.
Here are some of the factors that contribute to creating something that we like to call genuine content:
- Should solve the reader’s problem
- It Will help them get more value from your product/service
- Could cheer them up, encourage or inspire them
You must focus on creating content that is able to entice the users and supplement their needs.
Are you looking for the right marketing advice? Want to become a pro at online marketing? Want to learn the art of smart content marketing? If that’s the case, you need to take a look at this tool.
Don’t look for attention – grab it!
There are two ways to grab people’s attention: write something that creates controversy or write something that your audience can easily relate to.
Creating controversy isn’t really a good idea, as you never know when it might backfire. So, the easiest way to grab people’s attention especially with your content is to focus on their most common problems.
What this means is to try to write about subjects that relate to their lives. For instance, targeting the day-to-day problems that a 9 am-5 pm employee has to face.
Now, you might ask: how will my content stand out if there is already so much content on this topic? This is where your creativity comes into play. You need to find that angle which strikes the right emotional chord with your audience.
Keep testing by writing on diverse topics until you find the one alchemy (i.e. niche) that can convert your content into gold!
Remember, if you look for attention people might become part of the herd. But if you create something that grabs their attention, you are surely going to achieve the desired results with your content!
It all begins with a good headline
It is a well-established fact that today’s generation has a relatively shorter attention span than any other generation.
So, you need to create compelling headlines that could entice the users to read the entire content.
For instance, using emotional and actionable words, like “how-to” and “5-steps” always perform better than regular titles.
In a similar way, you can always A-B test different forms of titles and see which one appeals to most of your audience.
After all, there is no point in writing content that people would not read beyond the title. So, why not create something that keeps them hooked from the word go?
Monitor, track and respond
Okay, so we are trying to create content that boosts your audience engagement. But how will you know whether your content has reached that goal?
This is where monitoring performance and keeping track of the response it is getting from the readers becomes crucial.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics and more can prove to be a blessing. You can get to know about the reaction your content is garnering from your audience and plan your future content marketing tactics accordingly.
As they say, failing to plan is like planning to fail – you cannot survive in the competition without having a good plan. Monitoring performance could be the first step towards that planning!
Conclusion
All we have to say is that creating content is the initial part of a successful content marketing strategy. You need to amalgamate it with the right distribution tricks in order to get the best results.
If you have been running around in circles looking for tips and advice on how you can create the most enticing content that could skyrocket your audience engagement, then the advice shared in this post can prove to be just the perfect thing.
So, what are you waiting for? Try these content marketing strategies and see how beneficial they turn out for you!
Content Marketing Strategies That Boost Engagement
This week we’ve been talking about content marketing strategies and how content marketing drives sales in your business, regardless of what you sell, whether it’s services, or physical products, or digital products, or e-comm, whatever. You can sell more by putting content out. We talked about some of the benefits of content marketing and some of the history of content marketing and search engine optimization on Monday. Tuesday, I shared some of the tips and tricks that you can use from your content marketing strategies. Yesterday, we talked a lot about content types including advertorials, and I showed some advertorials that we run traffic to, that other media buyers run traffic to, and why advertorials are great from a bridge page standpoint.
Today, we’re going to talk about content marketing strategies that boost engagement. These are just some simple things that you’re going to do inside your blog posts and inside your content that is going to help you get more traffic, number one, and engage with more prospects, number two. Your content is often times it’s the thing that sucks people in. It’s always content in one form or another. It might be a live stream you do, a blog post that you write,t be an advertorial that you send traffic to, and be an ebook or something that people read or a Kindle book or whatever. It’s always a piece of content.
In the absence of having them learning about you and you being up on stage, or you being out at a networking group; in the absence of you, there is content, and that is the thing that sells people into whatever it is you’re doing. That is why content is so important.
Now, my name is Jason Drohn, for those of you who don’t know who I am. Every day we get a bunch more people who are watching these live streams. I created doneforyou.com. We specialize in building sales funnels, creating offers, and doing content marketing strategies automation, and driving traffic to grow businesses online. To put it short, we help people build shit and sell shit online. Content marketing strategies are always a big part of that.
Today’s article that we’re going to be digging through is over here. I’m going to throw this up on the screen. And then of course here is the post. I’m going to drop it in the comments box. You can check it out on your own. Now, here we have this live stream up top. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, go ahead and subscribe there. This is episode 94. We’re coming up on 100. In episode 100 I have some interesting things. We’re going to be switching some things around. Still going to be GSD Daily, but it’s just going to be indifferent tracks. I’ll let you know a little bit more about that.
Content is king.
Basically no matter how you slice it, content is king. That’s the absolute most important thing that you can be doing in your business content marketing strategies When the pandemic hit, when the crisis hit, so many people shifted their focus from ad budgets to content marketing strategies, and then they ended up discounting a lot of their products and services and everything. It’s one of the reasons why you see so much more content being pushed out right now. It’s why we started doing content, but the reverse happened for us. We started doing more content marketing strategies and then we started upping our ad budget to promote the content. That was an interesting shift. Content is the thing. It is the driver.
One thing you really, really need to stick in your head when it comes to creating content is you need to have this idea of a buyer persona. A buyer persona is really important when you’re building sales funnels, of course. You always want to write your emails, your webinars, your sales videos, all of that stuff, you want to write it to one particular person.
I have this avatar. I use it in a lot of examples. It’s exactly a boss to a degree that I used to have a long time ago now. His name is Matt. Matt runs around and basically, he’s running a $3 million shop, like a production shop. He’s the chief sales guy, the CEO, and the head ass-kicker. He’s everything. There is no executive-level other than him. It’s him and the accountant and then everybody underneath. He’s too busy to be growing his business any other way, too busy to learn, and never read a book.
Actually, he’s just so caught up in reacting all the time, that’s how he runs his business. This is literally the person that I write to, this Matt. Every single time I’m writing a local B2B sales letter or email or blog post, if I want to hit that person then I write for Matt.
It really helps you focus your writing and your content. Even this week, we’re talking about content marketing strategies. Content marketing strategies, I have a persona in my head. I have a person who I’m talking to when I’m recording this video. It’s a different person than last week when last week we covered … SEO? Yeah, we covered SEO. Yeah. I don’t remember. We covered something last week.
Target that Buyer Persona
It’s always a different person. I’m always talking to somebody different. It’s important when you’re creating content to target that buyer persona and target that person who is most apt to listen to the message and hear it. Every week for me is different because each of the weekly focus changes and in your business it’s going to be the same. You’re going to have a buyer persona. You’re probably going to have one, but you might have three.
I was on the phone with a client the other day and they have three buyer personas. They have grandmas, and then they have moms, then they have daughters, like age groups. It’s really three personas. It’s three different styles of writing. Unless you write for the mom and you write it so that you still talk about the family, in which case the mom makes the buying decision for the other two. In that sense, you’re still a one buyer persona, but you’re adding in a couple of other ones into the mix and you’re talking about grandma and you’re talking about daughter to the mom. It’s just important to organize them in your brain when you’re creating content. And speak to one person. You’re not speaking to a group, you’re not speaking to everyone; you’re speaking to one person. That’s the idea behind buyer personas.
Demographics and Psychographics
You can get really deep into the woods between demographics and psychographics too. Demographics are going to be:
- age
- gender
- qualifications
- income
- where they live
Your psychographics:
- feelings
- emotions
- dreams
- fears
- desires
Your buyer persona is a combination of the two and that’s who we’re really writing for. We can target demographics in ads. We can target age, we can target gender, we can target all of that kind of stuff. Psychographics is always the emotional triggers that we’re hitting within the ad copy itself. Between the two of them, they end up working out pretty well. That’s your persona is the person in the middle of that.
Writing Genuine Content
Now writing genuine content … We went out to dinner with a friend on Friday, a friend/client. Basically, we were just talking about sales and sales on the phone. He does a lot of stuff. We were talking about how sales are just real solutions. If you have a solution to a problem, then you’re always going to be able to sell it. He’s a damn good sales guy.
At the end of the day, writing genuine content is about framing solutions for people. These are going to be simple, quick solutions that somebody can get immediate value from within your content and be able to take something away very, very quickly just by even scrolling through a post and then just learning something or whatever. There are lots of different ways to frame content, but everything should be solution-based, especially when that content is framing up a product.
Like we talked about yesterday about the advertorials. If you have a blog post that is promoting a thing … The whole idea of the blog post is to talk about the eight things you can do with a two by four. And then what you’re doing is you want to sell a toolkit with maybe, I don’t know, a hammer and a screwdriver or whatever, from that to blog post. The whole goal of the blog post is to push them into that solution, into that toolkit. The content that you write is not going to be any different. You’re trying to find a very, very, very small, like a little, little tiny sliver of a problem, deliver a solution to that, and then move them into your offer. That’s what every single piece of content should be.
Writing better content is really just about framing up better solutions.
1. Good Headline
Now the big part is it all starts with a good headline. When you have your persona and you have your content, and then you’re going out and you’re putting it in front of people, so when you’re posting it on social media, you’re running paid traffic to your blog posts, like an advertorial would, all of that stuff then … which is all best practice. We’ve talked about it in some of our previous podcasts about creating celebrities. You’re creating content and then running traffic to the content and then the people who watch so much of that content, end up then seeing your next ad. It’s stuff we do all the time. You’re putting that content out to be consumed actively not waiting for somebody to click through or waiting for it to get indexed in Google and then see it. Basically, you’re actively promoting it.
It really all begins with a good headline. If the headline sucks, the headline of the blog post doesn’t work, then nobody’s going to click it. Nobody’s going to read it. We have a little headline optimizer tool that I’m going to show you. I’ve shown it in previous episodes, but I want to bring it back up. At the end of the day, you really just want to monitor your performance.
2. Monitor your website visitors using Google Analytics
Take a look at Google analytics. Make sure that people are landing on the webpage, staying on the webpage, reading the webpage, how they’re moving through your website, how they’re tracking from blog post to sales page, or whatever, all of that stuff is really an exercise in analytics. So being very attuned and accustomed to Google Analytics is going to be the best way to figure out whether your content is doing what it should be doing. Of course, you can do split testing tools and heat maps and all kinds of other crazy wiz-bang stuff that we should get into. Not this week, but maybe next week we will. It all starts with the content because content brings traffic.
Now, the tool that I want to show you is this headline optimizer tool. You can see it here. I’m just going to make this a little bigger on the screen so that you can check this out. You might not be able to read it, but it’ll be close enough. This is called Thrive Headline Optimizer Tool. Let’s go just look at it.
Thrive Headline Optimizer
This is part of the Thrive plugin suite. Really, really nice. It’s really, really good software. I don’t know. It’s one of these, but anyway. Basically what it lets you do is it lets you run tests. You can split test the headline of any blog post that is on your website. I’ve been using this tool for probably four or five months now, and I’ve seen a marked improvement in website traffic because more people are reading headlines that they like. Our headlines are now more clickable. What they’re doing is they’re going in and reading and all that stuff.
Every time we post a blog post, we always post four variations of that subject line. We have no attachment to any of the variations. All we’re trying to do is we’re trying to maximize clicks through that, whether it’s in Google, whether it’s in related posts, or whatever. Now, if we scroll down here, we will see that all of these articles have subject line split tests in them. We have the date started, July 22nd [inaudible 00:14:05] started July 21st. We do these every blog post that is now published we do a split test on.
Now, all of these are posts. These are the number of views here, so this column. Engagements and engagement rate; basically what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to maximize the engagement rate based on the headline. I usually just let it run until it has 75 or 80 engagements. Here’s one that has 62. Here’s one that has 373. Let’s see. Here’s one that has 143. We’re pretty diligent about logging in and T activating the ones that cross those thresholds. I can’t remember when the last time we did this.
Basically, I’m just going to go in here and I’m going to open up to this guy, which has had 143 views and 38 engagements. And then I’m going to check out this one, which had 90 views. Actually, that’s not a good one because it doesn’t look like it has had any engagements. There’s this one, which is 373 and 146 engagements. And then here’s one; 47 views, eight engagements. We’re going to take a look at this one, too.
Basically, this software just runs in the background. All it’s doing is split testing different subject lines. You can have as many subject lines as you want in here. Our rule of thumb is to have four or five. What happens is you get a graph like this. Our original headline is to create a lead funnel that generates leads 24/7. This one looks like we have a percentage improvement of negative 27.61. That did not win.
Our chance to be original is only 16%. We actually lost conversion on this particular one and all of the tests. We didn’t beat our control. The control is the winner and then what we’ll do is we’ll re-setup the test and then see if we can beat our control again. We start a new test, try to beat the control. But at the end of the day, we might not ever find something that beats the control there.
Now check out this one. This one was the one that had zero engagement. We’re not going to do that one. Then there’s this one, SAS KPIs, how to grow sales by tracking the right metrics. That’s the primary blog post title. We have two additional tests here. One of them is SAS KPIs, tracking the right metrics on your website and grow your sales, and then we have SAS KPIs, how to have successful sales. The winner surprisingly is this yellow one. It just barely overtook the red one.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to stop this test. We are going to choose the winner. That’s going to lock in the winning subject line. And then if we want to retest, we can always just start up a new test and try to beat the control again. We’re constantly working on finding the better headlines for our blog posts, and it does not even work. We’re just setting it up, letting the test run, and then we’re going from there.
This one looks like it all sucks except for that top one. We’re going to stop this test and we’re going to choose the winner. That first one is going to be the winner. The rest of them didn’t even get any clicks. I think that’s the last example here.
That’s a couple of different looks at how to run a headline analyzer tool and go from there. Let’s see. I think that’s about it for this article too. Those are just some quick tips on how to boost your engagement from your blog posts, write better content. Tomorrow we’re going to wrap everything up with content. If you have any thoughts, questions, anything related to how content marketing strategies work, how to get your stuff ranked in search engines, how to run traffic to your websites, building a sales funnel that converts, email marketing automation, anything goes to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little application and then book a time on the calendar that’s going to pop up right afterward, and the team will get on the phone with you and walk you through everything.
For Questions and Guide
If you have any questions at all, just go to doneforyou.com, hit that little chat box in the lower right-hand corner. It’s going to pop up with some different options you can go through and drop through the chat here, or just ask there and we’ll have somebody reach back out ASAP. Let me know if you have any questions.
