A conversation is not often spoken about, but at the end of the day, it is crucial to the overall goal of every campaign.
Internet marketing campaign goals require thorough planning. Be specific when you decide on your marketing goals, objectives and strategies to build a winning marketing campaign.
A Conversation Equals An Engagement Moment
It’s not enough to reach people, you have to engage them with high-quality, informative, interesting, and most importantly, emotionally-engaging content. Many try to get views, and views are good, however, engagement is a way to tell how good your content is at answering your target audiences’ most important questions. Or it can show you how well you are distracting your target audience from their biggest headaches (by entertaining them.)
“Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.” ~ Boris Groysberg & Michael Slind in Leadership Is A Conversation
Some common engagement measures:
- Pages per visit
- Average time spent per visit
- Bounce rate
- Social actions (likes, shares, comments)
A Conversation Equals A Touch-Point Conversion
I reject any notion that content marketing shouldn’t demonstrate a return on investment. As such, conversion has to be an important goal for any content marketing program. The only reason to execute a content marketing program is to drive business outcomes. And those outcomes come in the form of actions taken by the readers you are attracting. And while they may not be direct sales conversion, they should be conversions from one stage of the buying process to another.
Some common conversion metrics:
- Newsletter Subscriptions
- Registrations to gated content
- Clicks to your “Buy Now” button (or “chat now” or “call now”)
- Leads from your track-able 1-800 number
- Visits and conversions on other landing pages
A Conversation Is The Key To Success in Online Marketing
Lastly, I wanted to point out that many confuse their online-messaging with online-postulation. In other words, many try to tell their social-media/advert/website/email reader gobs of info believing that they are passing along the important information; forgetting that a conversation should be a natural two-way engagement.
Unfortunately, you can only provide so much info before people will tune out, so, make your conversations “emotionally-meaty”, speaking to the potential benefits and not the features. You will find that your conversion (and engagement) rate will dramatically increase when you do!
