Digital marketing requires more than creating the most user-friendly website or having the splashiest company logo.
Once you’ve attracted a member of the target audience to your brand’s website or enticed them to open an email, you need to have a way to keep their attention long enough to take the desired action.
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Creative, informative content is at the heart of what drives sales conversions, and every message you put into the digital world needs to be on-brand and tailored to fit the platform along with the interests of the target audience.
While it may seem like a tall order, the truth is crafting effective content comes down to following a few research-backed strategies. Learning about these best practices for blogs, email, and social media posts helps your company establish itself as an authority within its industry.
Understanding Platform-Specific Audiences
When you have a personal message to send, you likely choose text for brief, casual statements and email for longer, professional inquiries. The same concept also applies to business communication.
In the digital marketing world, it’s well-known that the target audience will likely have different expectations for the content they find on blogs, social media, and in their emails. Making sure that the tone, style, and format variations you use match the audience’s expectations ensures that they’ll find the content relevant to their current situation and needs.
Following the Best Practices for Blog Content
Blogs provide you with an opportunity to share more information with the target audience than they might read in a short social media post. With blogs, the primary goal is to capture the target audience’s attention and provide them with answers to their questions.
Typical blog topics tend to be more general than what you might put in a personalized email. Starting with a compelling headline is a great way to make people want to read your company’s blog rather than the competition’s.
To create a headline that people want to click on, you can use these best practices while keeping the general target audience’s preferences in mind.
•Try to stay within six to eight words
•Stick to the theme of the message
•Choose active verbs
•Use keywords
•Consider asking a question
For the main body of the blog, you’ll want to follow the latest SEO practices to ensure that the content makes its way to the top of the search lists. Identifying effective keywords and using the proper ratio for their inclusion ensures that the content is viewed as relevant to a user’s query.
Keeping sentences short and using subheadings and bullet lists also helps to maintain readability for a wider target audience.
With blogs, the length of the content also matters. Long-form content tends to be around 1,000 or more words for articles, and videos tend to take longer than one minute to watch. Short-form content also has its place for answering questions without losing a user’s interest.
Mixing both types of content is one of the best strategies to use since the difference between a 500-word and a 2,000-word blog’s engagement is only about 30 seconds more of engagement. Although the extra half-minute of attention might seem short, it could also make the difference in whether someone decides to make a purchase.
Diving Into the Top Practices for Social Media Content
Social media users tend to scroll through posts rather quickly, but capturing the interest of a customer during their free time when they have a mobile device in their hands can lead to rapid conversions. To be effective, social media content needs to be highly entertaining, eye-catching, and enticing enough to generate specific actions.
Since you may only have seconds to catch someone’s attention, highly visual and concise messaging is ideal. Currently, the most engaging type of content to include in social media posts is short-form videos. These videos that last under a minute tend to capture 66% of potential customers’ attention.
Short videos are great for catching the audience’s attention, and social media is also the ideal platform to use to generate interactions. Sharing polls, using hashtags, and posting stories are all ways to get people to interact with your posts. Getting more people to comment on the posts also encourages others to spend more time checking out what it has to say, and builds excitement about your brand.
The timing of social media posts plays a big role in how many people view the content. Taking a look at audience insights can let you know when the target audience is online and ready to click on posts. Once you know when to post, you can use pre-scheduling platforms or the native features on your company’s social media accounts to release posts according to the times that work best.
Exploring the Latest Best Practices for Email Content
Email marketing campaigns blend the best practices that digital marketers use for social media and blogs. Every email that your company sends needs an attention-grabbing subject line that boosts open rates.
Including personalization and segmentation strategies also helps each email to be tailored to meet the needs and interests of your company’s target audience. Adding strong CTAs and using conversion-focused email design adds up to higher click-through rates.
Integrating Content Across Platforms
Repurposing content helps to expand the ROI your company receives on its marketing efforts. When you repurpose content for different channels, try to maintain brand consistency while upholding the best practices for each strategy.
For instance, you might create a short teaser headline for a social media post that links to the longer blog on your company website. Or, you could condense a long-form blog article into an infographic or short video to share in an email.
Posting new, informative content works better for driving conversion rates than traditional advertisements. Our team at Semgeeks knows how to craft content to spread across a wide range of channels. Contact us today to learn more about your company’s target audience and the types of content that inspire them to take prompt action.
