3 Creative Hacks for Marketers to Boost Customer Engagement and Experience
How marketers approach marketing matters. Customers crave quality interactions and educational content. In the past, marketers exclusively advertised a product or service, but this approach does not work well with modern customers. As a result, marketers started to get more creative with their content and strategies, extending their capabilities tremendously. Through an innovative approach to content and new tools and systems marketing streamlined the process. Here’s how you can continually innovate in your marketing role today.
1. Put Effort into Diverse Content
Adding value to your content works wonders to gain awareness, leads, and conversions. In general terms, this means marketing needs to deliver content packed with actionable insights and tips. But your content’s subject matters just as much as the delivery. Thus, having a blend of written, audio, and video content allows you to expand your reach and increase the effectiveness of marketing activities. For starters, the following content types are reliable channels to diversify your content:
Blog Posts
Written content is one of the oldest types of web content and it still provides significant traction for marketing purposes:
- Websites that have a blog section have 434% more search engine presence than those that don’t.
- Companies that blog have 97% more links tracking back to their website.
- Companies with more than 52 blog posts on their website noticed 77% more blog visitors.
Blog posts are a valuable asset to both B2B and B2C companies. To increase the value of your blog, it’s best to create content that educates your audience rather than advertises products or services. A growing focus on customer experience and interactions in business means that providing value is important for the content you produce.
Infographics
Infographics are the perfect balance between writing and visual content and have been proven to extend time-on-site and CTA click-through rates. Leverage infographics to drive reader engagement and to spark conversation with your audience. People report that visual imagery reinforces the message causing them to remember 65% more information if it is presented in a visual fashion.
To skim through the vast number of topics you could approach in your infographics, look at marketing automation data. Advanced analytics and reporting tools will help you identify potential interest areas.
The best way to determine which topics will perform the best is by taking a closer look at historical data within your marketing automation tool. Expand on those topics and create follow-up infographics for the ones that have had success in the past. To expand the audience you reach, ensure to take a closer look at social media engagement metrics such as likes, reactions, comments, social reach, or even at your own website, and see which pages have the highest number of unique page views.
Deciding on infographic topics based on marketing analytics data will help you select a high-interest topic for your audience, contributing not only to the educational factor that we outlined as important but also to the overall customer experience your audience has when interacting with your brand.
However, if you launch a new product or service, an infographic on the issue your product or service addresses would be the most effective.
Video Content
Search engines perceive video content as high quality content. And we all know that search engines love high quality content. Not only this, but video content is also greatly appreciated by audiences, helping you achieve higher rates of CX and engagement.
Video content plays a major role in informing and educating your audience. Due to the vast number of businesses offering similar products or services, companies need to focus more on experiences and impressions. Consumers also tend to be less likely to be sold to. They need adequate resources for their research in the buying process. Value-based offers have become more important than sales and promotions, which has forced companies to get creative in delivering information.
To be successful, and most importantly, valuable to your audience, video content should tell a story or aim to educate audiences. This can consolidate your image as a leader and a voice in your industry. When using video content to educate or train your audience, ensure that it is also consistent with your brand voice and follows a brand story. Incorporate your brand mission, vision, and values, and make sure to set yourself apart from the competition.
2. Social Advertisements Help Content Shine
Social media ads have become a staple for business today. Marketers in charge of generating leads first need to think of the social media network that might work best for your company. While B2C companies will most likely rely on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, most B2B enterprises prefer to take this initiative on networking platforms like LinkedIn, or maybe even Twitter, depending on their industry and product portfolio.
You will also have to better target your audience. Targeting and segmentation will help you market with more relevance, find topics that your audience most likely wants to learn more about, and will allow you to develop more cohesive marketing strategies and messaging. Targeting and segmentation information is also a valuable asset to hand down to sales, once a lead goes through the marketing lead qualification process and reaches the sales-qualified lead status.
As soon as you tackle the targeting and segmentation process, start testing multiple messaging strategies to find out which works best for your company. Collect data on interactions and only then decide which strategy and messaging are the most effective.
For higher success rates of your social advertisement campaigns, you will need to tie each social media ad to its own form. You will have an easier time tackling this with the help of an advanced marketing automation tool that allows intuitive landing page creation. Make sure that the copy of each landing page that you create matches the messaging in the ad. This will help you maintain a consistent brand voice.
Tips to make social ads work for you:
- Social media advertisements need to follow a clear problem-solution logic. Because of the short format these ads follow, you need to compress their format as much as possible, without neglecting your customers’ pain points and how can your product or service help them overcome those.
- Leverage content assets to attract leads and inquiries. Link social media advertisements to forms for different types of assets (case studies, eBooks, infographics etc.)
- Develop multiple creative assets to avoid ad fatigue. Make sure you design multiple imageries to associate with your brand. You want varied visual elements, CTAs, and copies to avoid ad fatigue. Another good method would be to lower ad frequency.
- Improve as you go based on previous results. Social media advertisements will not be a success from the beginning. You will have to continuously measure results and adjust your messaging accordingly.
3. Nurture Leads with Email Marketing
A robust email marketing strategy is important. While all previous tips helped you gather lead insights and information, it makes sense now to start automating the nurturing process. And the best way to do that is by developing email marketing drip and nurture campaigns.
One surefire way to achieve success with email marketing is by mapping out an effective workflow based on your leads’ journey.
- Enable a robust lead scoring system and track what drives engagement and what pushes them down the funnel
- Develop email content based on your leads’ lifecycle
- Segment and personalize your emails
- Test multiple subject lines and previews until you achieve desirable results
Getting creative with marketing content is a cornerstone of successful marketing interactions, and you should always ensure to provide a vast selection of different content types to your audience.
To achieve content marketing perfection, explore the resources we have available for the modern marketer in our Resources section. From email marketing to marketing automation, and marketing automation software migration, we checked all the boxes.
