Get started with functional content in four easy steps!
Functional content marketing is all the rage. All the smart agencies are talking about it. Our favorite websites are even building out entire editorial departments around it. Functional content marketing is about creating experiences that enrich the lives of your audience while offering measurable results for you or your clients.
If your marketing plan hasn’t included functional content marketing, here are some tips to get started:
1. Do some intense audience research.
Before you decide where to build your content which medium or platform first, identify your audience, then figure out where they are. Embrace the research process! Create target audience profiles:
Sally is a married female who has been retired for two to three years. She enjoys knitting, doing crossword puzzles, writing letters to friends and family, and playing games with friends.
Sam is 17 and a high school junior. He likes Seth Rogan films and plays “Call of Duty” on PlayStation 4. Friends call him Selfie Sam.
Building these profiles, which marketing folks often call “personas,” is a great exercise for thinking through not just your messaging but also the medium where you broadcast those messages.
Here’s how personas help you:
If you wanted to recruit people like Sally for a big Bridge tournament in your community, would you produce a high-action video? And if you wanted to recruit members to join your military branch, would you send Selfie Sam a letter in the mail? As you’re reading that, you might be thinking, “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” But, we have seen clients experience “Aha!” moments when their content marketing hasn’t been speaking to or reaching the right audience. Developing personas helped make those realizations happen.
2. Define success criteria.
Figuring out which action you want your audience to take will also help determine your message and your medium. If your goal is engagement, what kind of engagement are you looking for? Once success is defined for each content platform, then that definition will guide the narrative you deliver and support your call to action.
How defining success criteria helps you:
In this case, it may be fun to use Snapchat, but fun doesn’t get you closer to your goal. Defining success criteria helps you decide which tools will get your message across and optimizes your communication techniques with your target audience.
*While Snapchat has historically been less engagement friendly, they are taking some steps to change that.
3. Optimize your content.
Again, this feels like a no-brainer, but this simple step gets missed way too often. Functional content needs to be optimized for the chosen medium, platform and success criteria.
Picking the right content for the right context will influence individual perspectives.
How optimizing your content helps you:
You can’t create one piece of content to be successful across all platforms. Your social media followers could be different from your email subscribers. And if you’re ever going to get your audience to take the action you want them to take, your content must speak to the right people in the right way. The good news is that if you do this right, your content will encourage action and build your audience’s brand loyalty. It’s a win-win.
4. Be hyper-vigilant.
After publishing each piece of content, no matter how small it seems, you must be on top of the data delivered by the platforms. Compare your defined measurements for success with the data and actively tweak your strategies. You may consider enlisting a third-party agency to implement custom tracking so the data is delivered in an easy-to-understand and easily tweakable fashion.
How hyper-vigilance helped us:
For one of our clients, we’ve discovered that feel-good stories generate fabulous engagement on social media. Obviously, everything we post for them is actionable (think “Click here for how you can help!”). Our fans click, they like, they love and they share, ultimately achieving our social media goal of empowering the audience and developing a trusted community. But when we sent out an emailed survey (to email subscribers), the client was surprised by the results. Over 45 percent of respondents felt that the same feel-good stories were least useful to them when reading the e-newsletter. If we hadn’t been vigilant about comparing our data to our success criteria, we would’ve never noticed and kept sending content our audience didn’t want.
Putting the fun in functional content marketing is more than just finding a fire-and-forget solution; it’s a constant management process. Execute these four steps over and over, and you’ll begin to hone in on the best platforms and messages to elevate your content marketing. Above all, you’ll speak to your target audience in their language and meet them where they are at. These two outcomes foster loyal audiences who engage with your brand.