Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that can be used to meet a wide variety of goals for a company. This can include lead generation, traffic generation, social media growth and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But content marketing is also one of the best ways to build customer engagement. It’s not uncommon these days for a digital marketing agency to use content to engage customers to deepen relationships, create brand affinity, and inspire customer loyalty.
But how exactly can you use content marketing to build customer engagement? Here are five different strategies you can use:
1. Educate the Customer
Educating customers with great content can help build trust, establish your credibility, and demonstrate your authority. Click To Tweet Most companies know far more than their customers about their products and services. But instead of educating them, they try to market to them why their products and services are the better choice. This approach can work but sometimes it’s better to engage from an educational angle.
For example, a roofing company can state that their roof repair service is more reliable than that of their competitors. But it will be far more engaging and believable if the company educates customers why this may be the case. Maybe the company uses a specific material or repair strategy and can go into deeper details about how these solutions work better than industry norms.
2. Personalize the Content in a Meaningful Way
A great way to make content more engaging to customers is to personalize it. The low hanging fruit would be to sync up your email marketing database with your website and embed personal data into the content when relevant. Simply using their first name in the content can lift engagement quite a bit, but a better way to do it is to make your content interactive.
A content marketing agency may learn that the audience is split into three main criteria and various sub-cafeterias for those main criteria. By simply allowing the customer to choose their criteria and sub-criteria, you can personalize the content to their specific situation. This only works if you really understand the various categories your customers fall under and plan your content accordingly.
3. Creat Targeted Content for Customer Segments
You also need to create content targeted for your different customer segments. It’s common for a digital marketing agency to collect data on their customers to create targeted marketing campaigns. But it’s rare for agencies to use this data to drive the content production, especially on a scale where content is created for all the different customer segments or audiences.
For example, a guitar manufacturer should be creating different content for both their acoustic and electric guitar players. They may even go one step further and create specific content for drummers and bass guitar players. Unfortunately, most companies take the mass marketing approach and try to fit a little bit of everything into their core content. You must be creating content for all your important customer segments if you want a high level of customer engagement.
4. Create a Conversation
Your content doesn't always have to be a one-way street. Creating conversations with your content is a great way to keep your customers engaged. Click To Tweet There are many ways to get the conversation going. You can include a survey at the very bottom, allow customers to post replies to your content, directly ask customers for their opinions, and make your content open-ended.
Some companies have even gone as far as incentivizing engagement and using gamification with their content. For example, companies can tell customers that the best response wins a coupon, discount, or free gift. They can also run fun contests with their content to engage their customers. There are many ways to create conversations and extend the life of your content. It all comes down to being creative.
5. Diversify Content Types
A big mistake that many companies make is only publishing one type of content like blog posts. An experienced content marketing agency knows that they need to engage customers in many different ways. That’s why they’ll use videos, podcasts, interviews, Q&As, webcasts, infographics, downloadable PDFs, and quizzes to engage their audience. It keeps people on their toes and makes them want to anticipate what’s next.
Creating different types of content also increases your options for distribution. Today there are many distribution channels for video, infographics, and podcasts. So you can use different types of content for both engagement and marketing purposes. Distributing to different channels will also help you if you are building social media marketing or SEO campaigns.
Conclusion
These are five solid strategies you can use content marketing to build customer engagement. Creating high quality content is just the beginning. You need to go further if you want to get customers to stay engaged with you. Hopefully, these strategies have begun to spark some great ideas for your business.
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