SPONSORED CONTENT
The more we listen to our audience and understand their needs, the better our content becomes. However, effective content can conjure lots of different ideas for different people.
“Content is what people want to consume opposed to what people have to consume,” said Ron Tite, CEO of the Tite Group. Today’s content consumers have universal choice – they aren’t passive in their diets, they’re carnivores. You need to satisfy the hunger of your repeat customers, yet continuously adjust the menu to ensure continuous growth.
Great listening is an essential ingredient to a brand’s content strategy, sure. The question is, how can we listen to an audience we haven’t found yet? Learn how to build a social persona and learn everything about your target consumers.
Learn how to build a social persona and learn everything about your target consumers.
There are five steps to creating content that can nourish your audience and grow your brand
1. LISTEN to your audiences across channels.
Real-time monitoring of what customers say online and on social media is important. However, brand listening needs to go way past this. You need to understand the buyer’s journey from beginning to end – across all channels – including traditional channels such as print and broadcast. You need to understand your audience – not just who they are, but all about their motivating factors and the influencers they value most.
2. TARGET key influencers and decision-makers.
Influence is not just about the size of someone’s audience; it’s about the quality of their interactions and the ability to motivate other people to take action. In fact, a micro-influencer with a niche but dedicated following can be much more useful than a big-name influencer whose audience isn’t engaged. Harness the insights you gathered when listening to your audience and identify who is driving conversations in particular communities, what they care about, and how they prefer to interact.
3. CREATE an effective earned media and content strategy.
Even today, brands’ earned media and content strategies are very often created in separate silos. This is very ineffective. Before partnering with your brand, influencers will research you, just as much as you research them – looking to see how well you’re attuned to your and their audiences. Demonstrate your value through thought leadership and engaging multimedia content. Conversely, a content strategy that doesn’t factor in an engagement strategy, incorporating earned media amplification in combination with paid and owned channels, will fail to achieve audience impact. It all must work together as part of a holistic customer and influencer relationship strategy.
4. ENGAGE audiences in a coordinated way across channels.
The only way to get your content in the right hands is by sharing your stories across multiple channels – including using earned media to generate interactions with key influencers. Your content can’t just be on your own social channels, or on your company website just like you can’t just invest in paid advertising. While each tactic has its place, the mediums need to be part of a synchronized, multichannel strategy. What’s particularly exciting about earned media’s potential to engage new audiences is that earning media pickup and sharing it via paid and owned channels can lead to more earned media – further amplifying your brand story in a virtuous cycle.
5. ANALYZE performance and attribute financial impact.
Today’s marketing and communication professionals are being held to stricter standards than ever before. You need to be able to connect the dots across all channels and program levels – from top-level strategy to tactical performance to real ROI. What’s working? What’s not? And can you quantify the financial impact your communications and earned media are making? A sophisticated analytics approach looks beyond individual campaigns and traditional performance metrics, focusing on conversion rate, pipeline, customer satisfaction, revenue and client retention with accurate data.
Cision and CNW are working together to help you map out, deliver and reap the rewards of a successful content strategy. To find out more, read our exciting Cision Communication Cloud announcement.
