Every brand must craft their digital axiom of excellence. Marketing in 2021 demands transformation and overcoming blind spots. Marketers must take an agile approach and embrace center-points of change, best practices in process, and an open lens on audience behaviors.
As you move into the new year, let’s polish your plan by setting profit-bearing objectives that will gain more attention, penetrate markets, incite actions, increase revenue, and leave your mark on the industry. This 2021 groundwork series starts with:
Engagement
Develop your road map from the following;
- Breadth and Depth
- Who, What, Where, How and Why
Breadth and Depth
Is your goal to build brand equity, compel an action, or spark a sale? By starting with your objective, the marketing tactic can be intelligently refined.
Aim for targeted campaigns, each with a well-defined strategy, in place of saturated messages and routine pitches.
Consistency is critical, including messaging, visual experience, voice, style and timing.
Ask or answer a question that is valuable to your audience. It’s all about solving a problem, inspiring an emotion, or triggering interest.
Make your brand relevant and resonating. How? Test a wide variety of engagements with different innovative and distinct strategies to identify where there is the strongest pulse.
Care about content in these three areas – consumption, creative, and sentiment
- Boost the amount of messaging that people absorb
- Use creativity in your design, audio, visual, presentation, and experiences
- Manifest a positive feeling and an authentic response
Motivation is better elicited from encouragement versus a claim, promotion or command.
Content should persuade, so people own their viewpoint. Efforts to convince will turn them off and tune them out.
Metrics should be focused on impact over engagement. Return visits over impressions.
Who, What, Where, How and Why
Who is engaging with the brand?
- demographics
- geographics
- psychographics
- repeat or new
- motivation level
- social activity and influence
What content are they consuming?
- type
- form and structure
- purpose (to inspire, to educate, to entertain)
- variety
- volume
Where is engagement happening?
- website
- blog
- social channel
- video
- webinar
- digital ad
The ‘Hows’ of engagement
- how often
- how long
- how immersed
- how consequential
Why do they convert, connect, take action, make a purchase, etc.? Lean into the whys by experimenting with the presumed answers. Hypothesize, test, measure and repeat.
Final Notes
- If you truly care about the brand experience, they will know it.
- For an immediate lift, you can buy visits and views – an effective long-term strategy requires organically building authority, value, and relevancy.
- Use testing to validate that your content is being delivered to the right audience, in the right format, through the right channels, and at the right time.
- Have a purpose behind each KPI and measure at both macro and micro levels.
Use engagement to amplify opportunities by leveraging your strengths and magnifying the unique features of your products, services or business model.
