Turning consumption into engagement

Content marketing is nowadays seen as the answer to a marketer's prayers.  Of course, it requires producing a lot of content but there is usually have lots of product information lying around.  It can just be smartened up a little, with a few added images, then posted, tweeted and referred to on Facebook.  Surely that provides content marketing and social media leading to community engagement?

Except that this misses one key element - involving the community.  We may work hard to combine well-worded content and stunning visuals into a mixture of videos, infographics, case studies and webinars; and this can lead to a satisfying number of visitors and clicks.  But how engaged are those reading, watching and listening?

There is a big difference between consumption and engagement, well expressed by Jason Hekl in his rant on engagement.  He proposes the use of the phone to create engagement, and this is a highly effective method.  But it is not the only way.  The principles of a conversation can be used online as well as on the phone.

The first thing is to open a conversation, not just broadcast your message.  So your content must ask questions and have a format for replies (you can comment below!).  It must pause from time to time to allow for questions or observations from the other person (so I will not make this post too long).  Explanations should be followed by questions to check understanding.  You need to find out more about the other person's interests and needs.

These things can be difficult to do face-to-face, and even more difficult over the phone, where you cannot see the person's expression.  Online it is even harder to judge a person's emotions or receptivity but you do have a number of advantages that you can use

• you can plan what you say and what questions to ask
• you can test different ways of saying things and different formats
• you can measure how people find you, what content they read and the time they spend in order to gain clues to their interest 
• you can make yourself known to thousands or millions of people to find those who most want to have a conversation with you

This last point is so vital because you have to be realistic.  Maybe only 1% of people who read your content will want to engage with you but, as I wrote previously, you do not need many conversations to create activity and debate around your products and services).

So I will be happy if any of you let me know - was this post of interest?  Does it match your experience?

I plan to post more about how to measure people's receptivity online - would this be useful or are there other areas we can explore?