There’s an easy way to understand what your customers want
It’s a wonderful moment when your content marketing campaign starts to take off with an apparent life of its own. You have passed the point of (hopefully) no return when your target audience trusts and rates your content so much that they start sharing what you have to say amongst their influential peer group.
It’s a wonderful moment when all of your social listening and data analysis starts to pay off, gaining you substantial efficiencies in your paid-for distribution, but also significant growth in FREE earned amplification.
It’s a wonderful moment when your initial client pitch is fulfilled and when growth in client site inbound traffic and product sales referrals are proving more effective than legacy approaches (and there’s now talk of upscaling your activities!)
Socially listen before you talk
Of course, it wasn’t always like this. There was certainly a period of floundering with first date nerves as your initial content marketing activity tried to find its mark. But as with any first date, it’s always good to listen. Content marketing is not all about you.
Social listening has been available since the beginning of social networks, you just need to know how to listen and how to cut through the noise to recognise what’s important. You may also need help in finding the right people to listen to.
The right tools, the best results
That Media Thing uses a range of software tools to inform our social listening activities including the excellent Buzzsumo, which is at the heart of many of our campaigns.
It’s an effective tool, clearly made by marketers facing the same challenges as their customers. But what also makes Buzzsumo special is its acknowledgement (in its own words) that ’influencer outreach’ can be a bit slippery.
It encompasses a wide-range of activities that fall somewhere on a spectrum between total spam and authentic partnership.
Social listening has been available since the beginning of social networks. You just need to know how to listen.
To quote Buzzsumo again: “Introducing tools into the process has the potential to push marketers toward either end of this spectrum. If we use the tools well, we gain valuable, enduring relationships. If we don’t, we populate the electronic trash bins of an ever widening circle of people.”
Wherein Buzzsumo continues its insightful blog, relaying advice on how to best use its software tool to decrease your chances of spamming your target advocacy group.
But it stops short of recommending how to use a complementary suite of software tools and online services that help overcome inherent problems with Buzzsumo’s own popularity.
Tools + experience = results
Buzzsumo has become so popular, and so incredibly easy to use, that your competitive edge could suffer if you don’t bring something else.
And like most web publishing tools, Buzzsumo can’t help but play a blind numbers game, with its users finding it difficult to ignore the top piece of content or top influencer in a given subject domain.
That Media Thing editors don’t just blindly follow data though. Our experienced editors are also domain experts and incorporate data into their content making decisions along with their journalistic nous.
Nothing can replace the decades of subject experience and passion inherent within the best domain expert editor.
Traditional agencies, with their teams of in-house copywriters, just don’t have the same digital publishing expertise to match that of our editors who have been at the coalface for many years.
Our expert editors gain an intimate understanding of a client’s products and services, so as to determine a best fit communications strategy with its target market. Crucially, they are not being blindly driven by a need to promote a client’s product or brand; their sole purpose is to promote audience engagement.
Once the appropriate target audience is engaging with the brand, a significant proportion of this valuable inbound traffic will soon turn its attention towards the product and services on offer.
It’s a wonderful moment when you uncover the emotive factors that drive your target audience to do what you want them to do. This can be guided by a range of content research tools. But nothing can replace decades of subject experience and passion for good content that you get with a domain expert editor.
This is where a bit of analogue thinking can overcome the digital blindness that often ensues in lesser informed content marketing campaigns.
That Media Thing creates authentic influencer engagement to drive growth in leads and sales. Contact us today and find out how we can positively impact your business email contact@thatmediathing.com
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