The 3 Pillars of the Reactive Marketing funnel
Learn how to leverage trending events to market your brand. Drive real results that meet your content marketing KPIs by using these three key strategies.
You can use trending events to engage your audience and grow your following. Seems simple, right? But anyone who’s tried it knows that growing a social, web, or newsletter community with reactive marketing can be daunting.
Converting your audience’s interest into meaningful KPIs can be a struggle if you don’t have a basic funnel and reactive marketing strategy. Consider these simple steps if you’re looking to build your reactive marketing funnel:
1. Social Media Marketing
Social platforms are at the top of the reactive marketing funnel. Think of them like a lake that’s a mile wide but only a few inches deep. The coverage of any message you send will be large, but the attention your message gets will be shallow. Users get bored easily, so having a diverse mix of social posts is critical to growing a strong following. Using trending events that impact your audience is the best way to turn your social feed from a one-note marketing channel to something users will want to follow and engage with.
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Simply growing your social media presence isn’t enough
Monitoring for trending events is the first step. You can use news feeds or a dedicated reactive marketing product like ContentEngine’s Event feed. Look for events that will hold meaning or interest to your community - usually there’s a lot of relevant news, and social media should be your first stop to sharing the best events with your audience. Remember - it’s not enough just to paste a link to a new item. Social media is about having something to say and sharing your point of view. For each reactive marketing post you make, try to find a unique spin or way to add value or insight.
2. Web Content
Simply growing your social media presence isn’t enough. Reactive marketing can also drive downstream KPIs. You can do this by creating and hosting content. Blogs, content portals, and email newsletters are great ways to convert user interest in trending events into on-site engagement. Try to put links to your own content in your social posts as often as possible. There can be a lot of trending events, and it’s not necessary to pair all of them with web content of your own, but as a rule of thumb the more your social posts link back to your content, the better. Reactive marketing platforms can also help streamline that process, increasing the percentage of social users you convert to on-site engagements.
From a funnel perspective, web content is the bridge between social media and the conversions that drive your business. But it’s more than that as well - it’s also a way to increase your site’s overall SEO, build audience groups for next-level ad targeting (read more about analytics and targeting here), and connect with your community on a deeper level than is possible over social media.
3. Email and Outreach
Once you’ve established your social media audience and web presence, it’s time to make sure you’re making the most out of the community you’ve built through outreach campaigns like email. Email marketing is a great way to connect with users and a more targeted way. Understanding and controlling targeting is one of the most important aspects of any digital marketing strategy. If you’re not tracking analytics events and tying them back to users, you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle.
Your community is attracted to your brand for different reasons, that might be preferences for certain products or services, certain kinds of information, or even specific kinds of content in your web portal. Using analytics in combination with email marketing is your way of understanding what your users want, and using targeting to give them more of it.. Reactive marketing campaigns can leverage email by connecting with users in a more agile way. Understanding what trending events a user is interested in is a great way to draw engagement driving higher open and conversion rates on email campaigns. By learning to craft emails which combine trending events with your products, services, or offers (more on that here), you can complete the reactive marketing funnel and drive the KPIs that matter to you.
Next - Using Analytics and Targeting To Get The Most From Your Campaigns
One of the worst mistakes marketers can make is to go to the work of crafting a successful campaign, only to miss out on hard-earned conversions because of poor analytics and user targeting. Understanding the basics of tracking events and conversions is an easy way to make sure you’re making the most out of your audience.