Having an effective content marketing strategy is imperative in today’s competitive business environment. One key element is social media marketing.
The above chart shows that social media is extremely important to overall content marketing strategies. However, despite its importance, it raises a challenging dichotomy. On the one hand, social media marketing should be about giving up control to a certain extent. This encourages brands to relinquish control and allows customers to talk on your behalf. However, on the other hand, marketers want control over the message they are distributing
The entire point of a marketing strategy is to make sure you portray your brand in a positive light. Marketing strategies can make certain conversations about the brand’s products and services are positive ones. So, how can this work alongside the social media platform conundrum?
Controlling Conversations on Social Media Platforms
Many brands struggle with the social media element of their content marketing strategies. The above chart shows the importance of getting the social media side of your campaign right. More than half of all consumers are unfollowing brands that take the wrong course of action on these platforms. So, how can you bridge the divide between content marketing and social media?
That setting will always shape the conversations that takes place both online and offline. Therefore, it is important to get the basics right.
First, ask yourself:
- What can I share in this community that will provide value for my ideal customer?
- What are consumers getting from conversations on this forum? Are they seeking help? Do they want to communicate directly with the brand?
Your answers to these questions will enable you to have a clearer understanding of your target customers.
When you give consumers what they want, they will speak more positively about your brand. Meanwhile, you can take the opportunity to steer conversations yourself toward relevant subjects. Pairing these two strategies allows you to take back more power while still giving your audience the freedom to talk.
Why Listen to Customers?
Although data analysis is useful, it can only gives you facts and figures. There may still be lots of gaps in your knowledge after using these tools. You can only fill those gaps by taking the time to listen to your customers.
Customers want to know you are listening to and hearing them. This means asking them for suggestions and feedback is essential to learn what they want. When you reach out to customers and respond to feedback, you can gather important data. You can then use it to create future content. Furthermore, you are demonstrating beyond a doubt that you care about your customers and their user experiences. As a result, you can build trust and improve your brand’s reputation in a public forum.
Conversational Marketing Changing Business Engagement
Consumers communicate with organizations in many ways. Being aware of those communication channels is important when it comes to engaging effectively with your audience.
Conversational marketing is about consumers’ changing communication preferences. Social media platforms have changed how users engage today with organizations and businesses. The most successful brands have recognized this and have harnessed their full potential.
Facebook has more than 60 million active business pages. Facebook Messenger exchanges more than 2 billion messages with these businesses every month. Businesses use these platforms for a host of purposes, including shopping, buying, getting content delivered, and accessing support. Interest in using these platforms will only increase in the future, so brands need to acknowledge this. They also need to use them to their best advantage to maximize their content marketing potential.
These emerging platforms allow organizations to meet consumers easily where they already spend time. Eighty-five percent of consumers are spending their time on the five most popular apps. Two of those – Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp –have more than a billion active monthly users. This means it is important to harness the power of conversational marketing for your brand’s advantage. It will allow you to control conversations for the good of your organization.
There are many benefits to conversational marketing:
Consumers using smartphones as their first choice to consume content prefer social content interactions.
These days, consumers are spending around five hours each day on their phones. Conversational marketing channels are naturally mobile-friendly. This means that you can use them effectively to maximize your content marketing strategy’s potential.
Conversational marketing also represents an excellent way of gaining valuable, new customer insights. Through social media platforms, customers tell brands what they want in their own words. This simply isn’t possible through other forms of marketing.
This makes conversational marketing a more insightful option than other content marketing channels. Which makes it possible to gather data efficiently and on a large scale. With this information, it is easier to optimize customer interactions and content for the best effect.
Once you’ve collected consumer data, you can use it to define trends and make informed decisions. It allows you to determine your customers’ common pain points and meet them where they are.
A further benefit is that conversational marketing allows your brand to build strong relationships with its target audience. You can also use it to drive the generation of leads by reaching fresh audiences across different channels. As a result, you increase your brand authority, drive up conversions, and boost revenue.
How Does Conversational Marketing Look in Practice?
Conversational marketing forms part of any successful content marketing strategy. It involves several strategies that you can put into practice:
- Using opt-in only e-mail marketing to provide updates, communicate news, and promote your brand.
- Using direct, simple surveys to ask for customer feedback.
- Using user-generated content (UGC). Reviews and testimonials can be extremely powerful. The statistics below show the level of trust that UGC can inspire in your target audience.
- Using feedback. Asking for, capturing, and acting on customers’ input through surveys, e-mails, and social media conversations.
- Rewarding loyal customers as a token of your appreciation for their business.
- Building relationships by talking and listening to customers.
- Being accessible and making it simple for customers to reach you. Live customer support, in-app chats, e-mails, and support on social media platforms are all examples.
- Implementing a customer satisfaction policy to show you are keen to remedy issues.
You can incorporate conversations into marketing in many ways. These initiatives are just some suggestions that brands use on a regular basis. The most important thing is to reach out to your target audience and begin a conversation. After all, beginning a conversation is one of the best ways of controlling its direction.
Dealing with Troublemakers
Unfortunately, managing an online community involves dealing with troublemakers from time to time. There will inevitably be some community members who begin to post negative conversations and posts about your brand. It is important to tread carefully here.
Some negative comments will be from those who have a genuine complaint. These commenters are not troublemakers per se. Rather, they are users who have a genuine problem with your brand, and you need to listen to them. Recognizing this and getting to the heart of their issues before solving them is key.
This statistic shows the importance of responding to negative comments appropriately on social media platforms. If you can publicly show how your brand acts to help consumers with issues, you can boost its reputation. Not only that, but those consumers who initially made negative comments can become ardent evangelists for your brand.
Unfortunately, the remainder of negative comments will be by “trolls.” These people are solely on the forum to provoke negative community reactions by posting negative comments. Luckily, other consumers can easily spot the trolls. It’s usually simple to begin a tidal wave of support to address them and get them banned firmly yet politely. However, you must be transparent about how you do this to avoid tarnishing your reputation.
Establishing A Quality Assurance Program
Content marketers are keen to keep control of their brand’s content. Yet this is not always possible when it comes to social media. This is where quality assurance comes into play.
When it comes to content marketing, quality assurance means devising a system to make sure you create quality content. Unfortunately, even well-laid plans sometimes go awry. Yet, with a quality assurance program built into your strategy, you will minimize those occasions. This allows you to feel more comfortable about your content wherever it appears on the web.
How can you achieve this goal? Here are several steps to follow:
- Have a clear plan. Advanced planning is a key step you can take for quality assurance when it comes to content creation. You can easily ruin your content marketing strategy if you don’t know the right place and time for publishing content.
- Train the team. Make sure every member of the content producing team understands the goals of your organization. Supply a style guide and teach those managing real-time communications what is appropriate or inappropriate for each post. Outline criteria when it comes to escalating replies or concerns about posts. If all the team members understand the brand’s story, they can share it in the best way.
- Designate media monitors. Assign specific members of the team to continuously monitor mentions of your brand online. Keeping on top of such conversations as and when they occur is vital. Regularly keeping tabs on your audience’s sentiments will help you know how you should respond and in good time. Meanwhile, team members will not overlook any key conversations.
- Never respond immediately to negative comments. It can be tempting to make another negative response right back. However, this is certainly the wrong course of action for any brand. It is natural to want to respond immediately. Every minute you leave a negative comment without a response feels like a lost chance to put the situation right. Yet, an immediate and inappropriate reply only makes the situation much worse. Wait, refer to the style guide, and draft a response that you can guarantee will produce a positive outcome.
- Avoid jargon. Using jargon only muddies your brand message. Use simple language and speak clearly, or your audience will lose interest. Think about the meaning of the words you choose to use and how your readers will understand them. If they cannot grasp what you’re communicating, they can’t respond effectively. Creating content that is readable and useful is vital to any quality assurance program.
- Don’t over-SEO. We know the importance of keywords for SEO. Every content marketer knows he or she should include them in all content whenever possible. This includes content produced for social media platforms. However, you need to ensure you are doing it organically. Bad SEO content will not create the desired effect, and the audience will dislike it. Monitor the use of your keywords. This guarantees your audience members will appreciate the content for its true value and not only because they could find it easily.
Taking Conversational Control
Part of any successful content marketing strategy is conversing with your target audience. Yet, when those conversations take place online, they are a little different from those that take place face to face. The illusion of being anonymous online gives those consumers a more daring, louder voice. Online forums amplify that voice, for better or for worse.
The thing to learn from this is to always approach conversations with customers online with forethought. Controlling the discussion forum is vital. However, you shouldn’t try controlling discussions or individual conversations. When you allow this philosophy to drive your brand communications across social media platforms, you can maximize conversational marketing.