Marketers can argue that there are many pros and cons
deeming content marketing or conversational marketing as the better choice to
implement. Truth is, they work together.
However, companies have stopped (and more should) thinking only in terms
of “creating content” and started thinking about having conversations. The
ultimate focus should be putting messages in motion—helping clients become
meaningful members of relevant communities and creating content those audiences
will find compelling, useful—and spreadable.
Why? What do I want to achieve by writing this bit of
content? Who? With whom am I conversing? What brings those people to my site or
app? What are their top tasks? Top questions? Conversations they want to start?
Companies should start by surrounding their customers with thought provoking
content that is buzzworthy, posting content at the right times, making content
useful and easy to find, targeting influencers and structuring content with
brand advocates in mind (Fay, 2012). Good storytelling is less about “telling”
and more about starting a conversation in your audience’s head.
Content without conversation is just broadcasting, or just
advertising because it goes to the listener/reader/viewer/visitor and stops
there. It’s one way. A well thought out content strategy is two-way and may
result in a message getting lodged in a person’s consciousness and becomes
something they want to talk about and share. That message then gets a whole new
burst of energy. The energy behind the message is what gives it meaning,
and a life of its own. Thus the conversation begins. In order to decide
which conversations are right, brands need to understand how conversations can
be used to achieve a wide range of goals.
As content is shared to start a conversation, companies
should then work to stimulate soft conversions, which includes viewing a video,
reading a blog or magazine article, or subscribing to a blog or magazine. To
trigger hard conversions -- when customers go through a registration page to
obtain content – a company should offer white papers and e-books. Drawings at
trade shows also drive hard conversions. It’s also important to have an
in-house semantic search engine that crawls the network on a regular basis and
categorizes every single piece of content against scores of different
conversation tags. Basically, that will identifies what a piece of content is
talking about and what the comments attached to that content are talking about.
Fostering conversations help humanize brands. Consumers
want to have a conversation with a company. They don’t want to be told just how
awesome the brand is or that if they don’t drink your Kool-Aid they won’t get
to play with the cool kids. Your clients and customers want to feel like they
are important. They want to feel engaged.
In summary, as a company moves ahead with the
conversation marketing tactics, they should keep in mind their marketing
fundamentals:
- What
are the campaign goals?
- What
segments do customers naturally collect into?
- Which
segments will be targeted for marketing success?
- What
message content will best resonate with target customers?
References
Fay, B. (2012). How Online Marketing Can Fuel Offline
Conversations. Mashable. Retrieved on November 12, 2012 from, http://mashable.com/2012/07/18/online-marketing-offline-marketing/.
