Content is king, and the amount of engagement that content is generating will tell you whether or not you’re hitting all of the right notes with your audience. The challenge, however, is that most folks know that content is king and marketers are creating more content than ever before, making it increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.
At Elastic, one of our main focal points is helping marketers improve content marketing ROI and generate better leads through engaging webinars (there are other ways we can help them produce engaging content as well). So we’ve put together 4 simple tips to help you boost content engagement:
Tip #1 – Focus on Quality
We talk to people about lead generation everyday, trying our absolute best to drive home the fact that they should be focusing on lead quality first and foremost. The same thing holds true for content. Don’t put together content for the sake of having content…you’ll never build a following that way, and your content won’t help you close business. Build content with your audience in mind. Content that will make them more educated, speaks to their challenges and where they are in the buying journey, and makes them glad they took time out of their day to read, hear or see what you have to say. That’s quality
Tip #2 – Be Consistent
Don’t be sporadic, have a consistent methodology for producing quality content and getting it out in front of the masses. While quality should be the most important piece of the pie, you need to back that quality up with consistent volume. The more often you get quality content in front of your buyers, the more engagement and ROI your content will generate. We talk to our customers about this all of the time when it comes to webinars. You need to consistently execute webinars to drive better traffic numbers and get the webcasting ROI you’re looking for. Simply dipping your toe in the water and running 1 or 2 won’t get the job done. You need to commit to them as an important piece of your lead generation strategy. The same holds true across all forms of content marketing
Tip #3 – Keep it Short and Sweet
With so many different people demanding their attention, today’s buyer has a shorter attention span and less time than ever before. Because of that, your content needs to get to the point. Invest in building content that can be put together in short form. For example, webinars and videos are great pieces of content that can be repurposed from longer form content. They can get to the point and immediately generate interest. With that being said, I do believe that webinars need to be shortened across the board. I see way too many webinars that are 60 minutes plus, and they don’t know that most of their audience is tuning out after 45 minutes. According to Forrester’s “Peer Stories And Credible Data Attract And Engage B2B Buyers” study, “In terms of buyers’ likeliness to engage, six pages is their limit when reading written material, 30 minutes for viewing webinars, and 90 seconds for watching videos.” I’ll say it again – GET TO THE POINT!
Tip #4 – You have to promote it!
So many marketers are so focused on producing content, that they don’t put forth enough effort in actually promoting it. The best content marketers not only have a production strategy in place, but a promotional strategy to get their content in front of as many eyeballs as possible. So before you submit the 1st draft of your whitepaper, take your infographic rendering to creative services, or finalize that webinar abstract, have an integrated promotional approach in place that is going to generate downloads, drive traffic and increase engagement