You are at a restaurant on a relaxed Sunday afternoon enjoying a fun meal with your family. Your “smart” phone senses your enjoyment and promptly beeps announcing an email or a WhatsApp message. Only a super important or interesting message can tear your attention away from your entertaining moments. But the message is some plain, redundant, repetitive content about a new product or service. What do you do? You will most probably groan in irritation and delete the message or, worse, block the sender. The digital marketing experts certainly loses your attention.
Challenging Scenario
This challenging scenario is the ultimate challenge for any email or related content marketing efforts.
- How do you get your target audience to read your content with interest, and engage with you and your brand even amidst their most relaxing or busy moments?
- How do certain brands succeed in connecting immediately with their target audience, arousing curiosity among the uninitiated, and gaining trusted following?
What magical potion do their digital marketing experts have? Let’s look at the top three magical pointers:
Push relevant content through diverse digital channels
Creating content is just a part of the digital marketing battle. The other mega battles include:
- Choosing the right combination of digital channels to distribute the content: You can connect with the right audience only through multiple digital channels where your target audience usually hangs out
- Ensuring that your messages do not invade your target audience’s privacy: Do not bombard your precious customers and prospects with loads of heavy messages that eat away their time and attention span
- Ensuring that content created has considered the specific target audience, distribution channel and call to action: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and WhatsApp, for instance, have unique interest groups hanging out for different reasons. If the content and call to action are not user-specific within the particular channel, then the content loses its purpose.
- Measuring effectiveness of the posted content: Use analytics to assess effectiveness or performance of content – e.g., open receipts, click through, or time spent by the user on a specific page.
- Going beyond the obvious measurable: In business, impressions, likes, or click-through are just enablers, but not the ultimate goal. Every business has high returns and revenues going through the roof as its ultimate goal.
In digital marketing communications, channels are enablers, while intelligent content is the right tool that encourages sign-ups, registrations, and monetary transactions.
Stay away from impractical offers
Some digital marketing experts are always attracted to the shortcut option of creating instant desires – providing attractive offers! Wow offers and impossible discounts will definitely get you immense attention, but many recent examples have proven that without proper revenue planning and infrastructural backup such hollow offers could be suicidal. Online market leaders who provide these attractive offers often use these tactics only as an accessory to their primary digital marketing efforts; some do not even make profits from this venture, while others use these volume-based sales as market catchments. Start-ups and mid-sized organizations focusing on revenue and sustainability must consider all aspects of such alternatives before blindly following the leader of their pack.
Create persona-based strategic content
This is the age of personalization – catering to specific persons in the audience. How can we achieve a granular level of personalization through digital marketing? Data analytics is the answer. Use data to determine the persona of your target audience and then create reader-specific strategic content that focuses on solving the reader’s specific problem. Speaking with your audience becomes easy when you have a face, a character, and an idea of the person’s likes and dislikes, favorite hangouts, and, most important, problems for which your product/service is a perfect solution – all these elements make up the persona.
An intelligent and genuine content triggers immense interest among your target audience, builds connect, nurtures trust, persuades them to act in your favor, and finally turn into your brand ambassadors. Content that drives your sales not through offers, but through conveying laser-focused values of your products/services. The ultimate aim for digital marketing experts are always the same – build revenue and grow immensely.