Abstract
It’s common knowledge that every brand should work with content to grow and reach its customers. But how should you work with it exactly? Should you post it on your own channels? Should you post it on social and buy views? Are there other strategies? This article explores different approaches.
Content and Distribution
Content is much more than just fodder for social channels. We have defined some aspects of content production in previous articles. For instance, what content is and the function it serves in the article about Making or Buying Content. The article about Layer 3 Content touched on reaching and engaging communities through content. Feel free to have a look at these articles before reading on. These posts explain how we understand content. In this article, we look at some aspects of its distribution.
Before we do, let’s distinguish two things: Content differs from posts on your channels. You might want to share what you are doing at a particular moment or a quick selfie with clients or of you using a product. These are posts. Content describes the media you share in your post. A whitepaper is content. A short film about a product is content. A podcast episode is content. A post about reaching a milestone in your business isn’t. Not for a brand at least. Even though this might seem obvious, the distinction is rarely made in many brands.
Regardless of its shape or form, most content will reach your audience online. We can certainly lump print and TV commercials into the content category, but let’s focus here on media that you distribute on the internet. Realistically, brands will allocate most marketing spend to online nowadays. Several distribution channels exist here: Channels you own, such as your website or podcast, and channels that others own, such as your social media profiles or the channels of affiliated entities, such as a marketing/PR firm that you enlist. It’s equally easy to post on either of these distribution channels, but the effect will differ greatly.
Measuring Engagement
The most important online metric for marketeers is engagement: Views, reposts, shares, comments, likes. Equally importantly is conversion. How many people follow your call to action after seeing a particular post with your content? To really appreciate engagement metrics, let’s briefly rehash the function our content serves. It embodies the heart and soul of your brand. It fills certain needs in the market, such as a knowledge gap. It can also have pure entertainment value, while tying your brands into a specific story. It can be a mini documentary series about developing a new product. It can be a podcast interview with an industry heavy-hitter.
Engagement in this context means that potential customers of yours see your content, like it and now consider doing business with you. This differs from simply clicking on a post and liking it. It means your content actually moves your audience to do something. Unless your entire sales process is online, measuring true conversion is incredibly hard. One clear indicator of engagement is customers telling you that they reached out because they watched, listend to, or read something of yours. A clear uptick in sales after a campaign also indicates people liked what you posted because they now want to have their needs met with your products or services.
Without going too deeply into measuring engagement, let’s say that views, reposts, shares, comments and likes fall short of measuring true engagement. The only true indicator that matters is an uptick in your sales. Linking a specific content campaign to this is far from an exact science, regardless of what social media platforms want to make you believe. Social platforms make billions by convincing advertisers that they have conversion nailed down thanks to their wealth of data on potential customers. However, the old saying that “half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is you don’t know which half,” might ring true today still. Otherwise, every brand that spends a fortune on Facebook would rake in billions. This is clearly not the case. There is more to successful content strategy than dropping money on social ads. You can never pay someone to like your brand. Above all, it matters what you post. In other words, the content that you post matters the most. If your content is killer, a small paid boost can already tip the needle because it wins over your audience on its own.
Putting Content Production First
Who would you hire: A clever marketeer who knows the ins and outs of paid ads? Or a producer who wraps the heart and soul of your brand into content that engages your audience? We suggest the latter first and then the former. You may allocate millions to your social campaigns with zero effect if your content is off. Conversely, you can get away with small social spend to test different audiences if your content has the potential to move the needle in your favor.
With content, doing the right thing matters more than doing things right. We know of brands with five digits social spend per month and zero content production spend. Would they allocate a fraction into proper content production, they could divide their social spend by ten with better results.
Conclusion
This article describes how content strategy relates to distribution and engagement. Distributing content seems deceptively easy. Social platforms are happy to sell eyeballs to brands. However, high likes, views and comments matter less than measurable conversion. In our view, the right content drives conversion. Putting the focus on the right content first can save brands from overextending themselves on social media spending. Instead of spending nine dollars to make ten, we propose to test different audiences with tailored content until you gain measurable and meaningful engagement that matters to your bottom line.
Open Questions
- Do you reach your conversion goals with your online strategy?
- Are you engaging the audience that matters to you most?
- What are you spending on social ads per month?
- How does your social spend relate to your content production budget?
As always, looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
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