If you Google “The three Rs of content marketing,” you’ll get a long list of results. The most common Rs are borrowed from that old familiar public awareness campaign to keep our planet healthy: reduce, reuse, recycle. These three words can be boiled down to a very common but very important concept: repurposing content. By all means, repurpose your content for different platforms and segments of your target market. But here we present to you the three Rs of content marketing that you must observe and measure to the best of your abilities as your business publishes relevant content. If you follow these metrics, you can see what is working and what isn’t–and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Reach
The Internet grows noisier by the day. Every brand, from Fortune 500 companies to wannabe YouTube stars, are vying for your attention. Try as they might to multitask, people can only focus their attention on one thing at a time, and time is a limited, valuable resource. As your business publishes content, you must assess the reach of your company’s voice.
If you’re starting from scratch, first understand that you have a long journey ahead. To earn a dedicated following, you must give until it hurts–and then give some more. But if you already have a presence on a particular platform such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or YouTube, then it’s your job to figure out how to promote your newest publishing channel by leveraging your existing one. It could be a video previewing your new blog, or a Facebook post encouraging followers on Twitter. Be sure to take on one channel at a time to ensure that you don’t spread your resources too thin.
Relevance
Unless you’re writing to show off your writing skills, we can assume that you have an audience in mind that you’d like to reach. This audience should represent your target market. Before you begin writing, you must do your homework: Who is your buyer persona? What are they searching for? How can you help them?
It can be tempting to focus all of your content on identifying problems that can only be solved with the purchase of your product or service. This strategy is usually misguided for a couple reasons: First, it limits the range of content that you can create. Second, your audience will see that your only goal is walking them to the cash register, and they will not likely reward you with any loyalty or word-of-mouth recommendations.
Focus on how you can help your customers, even if that means solving problems outside the scope of your business. For example, if you sell a fitness service to busy, affluent dads, offer them productivity tips for work. As long as your target market is interacting with your brand, they are more likely to buy from you when the time comes to solve the problem that your business specializes in.
Reaction
When your content begins to attract eyeballs, pay very close attention to your audience reaction. Most people will read and move on. That’s okay. Nobody shares or comments on everything they see on the Internet. But when someone does share a blog post, note what platform it’s on. Make sure it’s a positive re-post, and not a negative one. Then observe how their networks react to it.
When you pay attention to the reaction your audience has to your content, you can use that information to create more relevant content and maximize your brand’s reach.
Use these three Rs of content marketing to hone your strategy continuously, and your business will see growth of the most important R of all: revenue