Known as a Republican pollster, Frank Luntz has built his career around shaping political and corporate language.
You better get a hard copy of Luntz’s “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.”
We think that it’s a masterpiece of ingenuity, not only because Frank’s accomplishments in the field are commendable, but it’s also just that the idea of engaging your audience through content marketing hits close to home with his work.
Besides that:
- Ryan Holiday recognized “Words That Work” as one of the top 16 marketing books of all time.
- The Atlantic referred to him as “America’s foremost political wordsmith.”
- In one of his speeches, former U.S. President: Barack Obama acknowledged Luntz’s incredible oration and his way of engagement. “When Frank Luntz invites you to address his focus group, you take the opportunity.”
The million-dollar question is: What does that mean, or how does it all interpret in terms of content marketing?
Read on…
Content Marketing Strategy: Engage Your Audience Like Never Before!
It’s a broad-spectrum analogy alluding to audience engagement through content marketing.
While many marketers know the type of content they need to create and the overall approach, it’s the words and the sense of engagement that they lack.
For all we know, there are tons of videos, blogs, and other forms of content that are blatantly bland. The opening isn’t engaging enough.
One relative example is that while creating this guide on how to engage your audience with content marketing, we had the option of either opening with some random intro to content marketing, or something different on political influence’s relation to content marketing.
And we think you know the better approach right there.
Would you have continued to read this write-up if it had a bland intro? We don’t think so, because, by now, you have probably read such blogs, seen such videos, and skimmed through such articles before.
It’s All In The Strategy:
In the immortal words of Andre Morys, CEO & Founder at konversionsKRAFT, it’s all about creating a resonance effect with your piece of content. That’s the only, or perhaps one of the most crucial keys to keeping the audience captivated enough, so that they move through the marketing funnel, all the way through the conversions stage.
This post highlights that particular aspect for all the marketers out there, especially startups with limited marketing resources.
The latter category struggles with funds, a small team, and a single marketer whose also an all-in-one CEO.
It’s a process that many startup owners go through after founding a digital marketing company.
That’s why, it’s super important to create content that has an impact, without being too overwhelming.
1. Understanding your target audience
What captivates one audience may not be appealing to another.
Therefore, it is crucial to dedicate time to research and truly understand your audience. You should delve into their preferences, needs, behaviors, and challenges.
By gaining this insight, you can create content that resonates with their challenges, desires, and requirements.
Here are a few fundamental parameters to consider when researching to understand your target audience:
- Interests
- Gender
- Audience Age group
- What are their favorite platforms?
- What are the pain points?
Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can proceed to create content specifically tailored to them.
2. Content Repurposing With a Twist
Repurposing content comes in different forms.
You have the option of rewriting the previously dated content with some wordiness, a bit of an update and vice versa.
But, when done, the right way, repurposing not only provides relief from content overload but also frees up time to create insightful, compelling long-form content that forms the foundation of your company’s content library.
Case in point, the emphasis is on creating something insightful with facts and figures, adding to the content with something noteworthy and vice versa.
For instance, if you had a listicle on the ‘Best Content Marketing Tools, Free and Paid,’ repurposing would require you to add new software to the list, alongside the latest statistics, pros and cons of the tools, and new questions to the FAQs section of the original post.
- Extract graphics, key statistics, and general findings to create social media posts for your active channels.
- Use a subsection of the blog post to create a long-form post on LinkedIn or Medium.
- In addition to doing so, you can redirect the audience to that published content through a fresh Tweet!
- Transform the blog into a downloadable eBook to capture new leads.
- Use the blog’s theme as the foundation for a webinar panel or podcast episode.
- Record sound bites, overlay them on video clips, and share the new video on social media channels.
- Use a subsection of the blog to write a byline for an industry news site.
- Utilize the blog as the basis for an email newsletter.
- Over time, update older blog posts with new statistics and examples, and share relevant updates on social media channels.
Apart from gaining greater visibility and more time for content creation, repurposing offers the advantage of understanding which content resonates most with your target audience.
The same goes for repurposing blog content on LinkedIn using various graphics, videos, direct links, and quotes, you can identify patterns in the content attributes that receive the most engagement.
To rise above the vast amount of content and communication noise, content marketers must master the skill of content engagement.
3. Understanding Your Niches and Categories
Your audience will come from two different pools.
That way, you need to create content and market it in a way that engages the intended audience.
We’ve got B2C and B2B sectors where not only the tone of the content matters but also is subject matter expertise area.
- B2C audiences are ordinary people like us who like humorous content, or something laden with information specific to the product, or the service you’re offering.
- B2B audience, on the other hand, will look for a professional tone, the features that your product/ service is offering, and assurance that it works as advertised.
Scale it up to B2B customers on the enterprise level, they look for feature-rich products with distinct criteria for how your offering is different, the team size it can cater to, and vice versa.
B2C audiences seek entertainment, so humorous and meme-based content is ideal.
B2B audiences seek thought leadership, so opinionated and informative content pieces are necessary.
- Tone and Voice: Is the tone authoritative or more fun and personal?
- Narrative Story: Even in non-fiction content, a narrative voice or a captivating trail of breadcrumbs keeps the audience engaged with the piece.
- Communication Matters: The value and focus of your content, whether informative or entertaining, greatly impact its effectiveness.
By keeping these three factors in mind, you can develop compelling content that effectively communicates your message.
4. Visual and Textual Elements Incorporation For Better Audience Engagement
Avoid the misconception that content solely revolves around written words.
Content serves as a medium to communicate with your target audience and can encompass various forms such as text, images, infographics, videos, or interactive features.
It can be distributed on social media platforms, websites, blogs, or unique platforms.
To create engaging content, it is crucial to incorporate interactive elements like quizzes and polls.
Fortunately, if you’re using WordPress CMS, you can embed quizzes and polls with the help of plugins. It’s easy, it’s convenient and doesn’t require a lot of tech-savviness from your end.
As opposed to text-only content, or videos with the same style, interactive elements spark curiosity, invite exploration, and provide an immersive experience, thereby making the content more memorable and shareable.
By leveraging the power of visual and interactive content, creators can enhance engagement levels and establish deeper connections with their audience.
Key Takeaway: Your content doesn’t have to be limited to words alone. Plan your content strategy accordingly, taking advantage of a wide range of mediums.
5. Content Assessment and Evaluation
This is the part where you need to ensure how much your intended audience is interacting with the content.
Churn usually occurs at a high bounce rate, indicating that the content wasn’t interesting enough, your overall page structure or the way you designed the website and presented the content doesn’t really provoke any incentive for the audience.
Other questions are:
- Are people actively engaging and interacting with your content?
- Are visitors quickly leaving your landing page?
- What does the data indicate?
Assess the available data to gauge the level of engagement your content generates.
The best way for doing so is through content marketing and analytics tools.
Google recently shifted to GA4.
Combine that with GSC (*Google Search Console) to create events, set up goals, and user behavior tracking. Everything needs to be monitored to see your audience’s entry and exit points so that you can create even better content, or make optimizations for a higher engagement rate.
6. Optimizing Video Content For Audience Engagement
Here’s how to effectively leverage a single piece of video content to enhance your marketing efforts:
Step 1: Create a thoughtful flagship video content piece.
The cornerstone of a successful repurposing strategy lies in creating exceptional flagship content. Flagship content consists of in-depth, engaging, long-form pieces that offer substantial value, prompting readers to bookmark and share them with their networks.
This type of content can take the form of a long blog post, eBook, podcast episode, or webinar, and should provide actionable advice, industry trends, inspiration, or entertainment that aligns with your brand’s overall strategy.
Flagship content aims to generate qualified leads, so keep this objective in mind when selecting the theme and format.
Adopting a video-first approach often proves effective in terms of ease, efficiency, and results. Producing a video provides various video assets for platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
However, these assets can also be repurposed for other content types. For instance, videos can be converted into audio-only for podcast content distributed across all platforms, from LinkedIn to Twitter and Facebook.
The script developed for the long-form video can be condensed into micro-content pieces approved for use on social media, blogs, and newsletters. Utilizing video content to guide your social media strategy maximizes the value and utility of each new piece.
Step 2: Repurposing your evergreen content
We also talked about this earlier.
The way you refresh a cornerstone content piece is usually through strategic repurposing. Not only should the content extend, or add value to previous value-offering, but it should also create resonance in the audience group.
A small change, such as updating your article’s hero image, or the video’s thumbnail, which a lot of YouTubers do on their evergreen videos, is guaranteed to get some eyeballs.
To build an effective repurposing strategy, list all potential channels that can benefit from the content in its original form or with modifications.
These channels may include owned, earned, and paid outlets.
Examples include posting on
- Running paid advertisements on those platforms; creating a YouTube video; writing bylines; hosting webinars or podcast episodes; pitching the original content to other outlets for reposting; sending it to your email list, and more.
Choose methods that align with your brand’s goals and objectives for the quarter.
For instance, let’s consider BMV’s collaboration with Preddio Technologies, an application-specific IoT solution provider.
Preddio published a white paper on IoT, serving as their flagship content. After its publication, the white paper was used across multiple channels to capture new leads.
Graphics and quotes from the paper were shared on social media for over a month, the white paper was sent to their email list as a newsletter blast, a subsection of the paper was transformed into a byline for Enterprise IoT Insights, and the entire white paper was republished on industry media sites like IoT Business News and RFID Journal.
Repurposing the white paper generated owned content for over a month, giving the marketing team time to plan and create future content.
Using it as inspiration for a byline expanded the company’s audience and maximized the white paper’s exposure.
As It Turns Out:
As you develop your overall strategy, occasionally supplement repurposed content on social media channels with other posts such as curated industry news, highlights of evergreen content, or any other content that effectively engages your audience, things will come naturally to you.
In the long run, it’s all about an out-of-the-box mentality and doing more than what the Average Joe is doing out there by having a keen interest in your competitors, etc.
Good luck out there and don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
