The powerful tool you need to try
Plus: Your competitive edge for content marketing
Understanding your audience’s needs is the key to creating content that drives traffic and conversions.
This week, we’re digging into strategies for hearing what your audience is saying so you can give them what they want—and they’ll respond in kind.
Today’s agenda:
🧪 Tips for testing your content
📮 Where to share?
👂 What social listening can do for you
💼 Briefly: AI fears, downturns, and Macbooks
⏱️ Up & coming
🔬 Testing, testing…
In last week’s letter, I briefly touched on A/B testing for emails.
But this testing method can be used for much more, including:
Calls to action (CTAs)
Images
Phrasing
Karen Hopper, senior director of performance marketing at Bully Pulpit International (BPI), says the best places to test the audience’s motivations in content/marketing are in “forms and other conversion points.”
Tips for executing your A/B tests
Look at what other brands are doing to pull examples for your own brainstorming
Dig into your data on subscribers, clicks, visits, etc. to pinpoint what is/isn’t motivating your audience
Determine which ideas you want to prioritize and pursue
Create hypotheses about your ideas to measure impact
Test your hypotheses, examine your results, and repeat!
💡 Hopper strongly suggests that marketers run only one test at a time. Otherwise, you won’t be able to pinpoint what exactly made the difference.
👀 Get more eyes on your content
You know the drill: Create your content and share it across your channels.
But that’s not all there is to it—you could be maximizing your content by sharing it more effectively and optimizing it for each channel.
Generate more traffic with each piece
Kevin Rowe, founder & head of digital PR strategy at PureLinq, has 22 other places you could potentially be sharing that may be more effective for your brand.
To zero in on which sites are best for your business, consider the following:
Map out your customers’ online journey so you understand when, where, and how to address their biggest questions and pain points
Create “zero-click content” that stands on its own and doesn’t require a click (short posts, videos, infographics, charts, etc.)
Share your commentary or unique insights into a trending industry or media topic
💡 Worried this will take more time and effort than you’re able to give at this point?
Adopting this strategy may take extra time in the beginning to establish, but once you’ve fully owned and understood your channels, audience, and goals, optimization will become more natural and intuitive.
🌐 Boost your social listening skills
Not sold on social listening?
It’s simpler than you think to execute—but the results can be powerful.
According to Sprout Social content strategist Ronnie Gomez, just one query can provide a “rich, unbiased view of consumer sentiment.”
How to do it
Invest in a social listening platform such as Sprout Social, Brandwatch, or BuzzSumo
Or, use a free tool like Google Alerts or Answer the Public
Determine your business’s top priorities and the conversations that could provide helpful insights for your team
Look to the topics that are important to your audience
Keep adjusting your queries to get your desired results
💡 Think your business is too small to execute successful social listening?
Gomez says thinking “beyond brand health” and into market research or competitor insights can be an extremely valuable form of social listening.
Briefly
💻 Adjustments to make on a new MacBook that will optimize the battery, make it work more efficiently, and more
💰 Top economist says there are three reasons the U.S. hasn’t had a recession yet
🖼️ Snapchat plans to watermark AI-generated images in efforts to curb deepfakes and misinformation
🤖 Manager survey reveals thoughts on whether AI will replace employees in the workplace this year
🧵 Hootsuite guide explains how the Threads algorithm currently works
Up & Coming
Speaking of AI… here’s how experts think AI will transform the workplace—and which jobs may be impacted the most.