Published on August 30th, 2016 | by Guest

Engagement, Trust, or Loyalty: What Should Be the Goal of Your Content?

Now that you’ve setup your site and it looks good, and you’re ready to fill it up with all the useful contents you want to share with your visitors, what should be your other goals? What is your main goal? Is it enough that the content is useful? Was your goal simply to set up your own website? Are you thinking of converting visitors into customers? What other factors should be in mind so that the visitors do not remain just visitors? In this article, we will look at three goals for content: engagement, trust, and loyalty, and which of these three you should focus on more.

What is an Engaging Content?

What engagement means, to put it simply, is that people can notice your content and in some ways, interact with it. Interaction can mean social sharing, liking, leaving a comment, sharing a link, and all of the other activities available on social media and online.

It’s a good enough goal if we look at engagement this way. Where the problem lies is if engagement becomes the most important Key Performance Indicator or KPI of how your brand is doing. It is because you are never really sure if engagement alone can move your brand forward and actually make you earn some profit.

What’s the Problem with Engagement?

Engagement as a metric of significance presents particular difficulties; this includes the fact that it is hard to measure; it is even harder to sustain, and probably the most difficult of all, it is very easy to copy.

Here’s a scenario of how your competitors can kill your engagement strategy all too easily. Your competitors can go to Google, do a site:search and they can see your top-performing contents. It’s easy for them to tell their writing staff to study your ideas and expound on them more with, better details and examples, and with more captivating graphics and illustrations. You just lost your chance to advance in the search engine results and your competitors are getting more traffic than you.

Engagement is a value that is impossible to measure in a tangible way. The best thing to look at would be the comments. But somehow, engagement as the only goal indicates that brands do not have a clear purpose for their content marketing. Engagement should be one of the goals, a kind of starting goal, but it should not be the only goal.

How Will People Trust Your Brand?

When you are successful in catching the attention of your audience, that’s great already. It means you are successful at being engaging and producing engaging, useful, and even entertaining content. The next goal would be for people to trust your brand.

When people begin to trust your brand, it is a significant achievement when it comes to content marketing success. Engagement is enticing people into your content, and that’s a good start. But getting people to trust your brand is another thing.

Trust means people are starting to look at your brand and the people who represent it, what it stands for, and what they feel about it, and have something to say about it. People are starting to have feelings about your brand, a personal opinion, and preference.

When people trust your brand, they will see your products as the reliable option; they like the association that comes with it, and they see those interactions. To achieve this, you brand and brand representatives need to be visible to people both online and offline. It will allow them to develop a certain sense of familiarity and a form of positive association with your company.

In getting brand representatives, you may be reluctant at first to have a face represent your brand, but the truth is that you need to have a face that will represent you. These brand representatives will allow lead prospects to build an affinity and not simply an association with your brand; this is how people get to trust your brand.

Other than writing posts and sharing those contents, your site should also share valuable content and engage in meaningful online conversations with your customers. Your presence ought to be felt both online and offline, as humanly as possible. It’s because people respond best to people. Visitors want to feel that they are talking to a human being and not just some automated response program. It makes your brand more personal and people like that.

What About Loyalty?

The path a successful content marketing leads to loyalty. Loyalty should be your goal. If it’s not your goal, you can scrap the old one and take in this one.

Loyalty as a goal provides a long-term look at how you want to run your contents and your site. You will always think about what you can do for your clients and how you can improve your services and products. You know that the contents you will be producing will be helpful for your readers, and you are really sharing your expertise. You don’t just think about enticing them into your site. Loyalty as a goal assures you and your customers that you are giving your best to them and not just ripping them off for a quick profit.

Work on getting loyal followers, they will actively seek out most, if not all of the contents you create. Think about it, instead of doing all the sharing and promotion, if your brand has an avid fan base, they can do the sharing and promoting for you.

Loyal followers will also actively participate in helping you create content. You will see them in the comments, their own blogs with links going back to your site, numerous questions, suggestions, and responses on the social media. The next thing you know, you have built your own community. And that should be what you have in mind, a loyal community.

Takeaway

Engagement, trust, and loyalty are all important goals when it comes to content marketing. But for the long-term success, it is important to keep in mind that loyalty is the goal for all the contents you create, share and promote.

If you are successful in engaging your visitors and earning their trust consistently, your team can go about and ensure that they can call the attention of your visitors so they can introduce more products and services. Also remember that content is there as a means to support your marketing efforts and not to define them.

Author’s Bio:

Nicolas Finet the co-founder of sort-list.co.uk – an online-tool reinventing the way businesses find marketing and communication agencies. Follow him on Twitter @nifinet!

Tags: business, content, engagement, goal, loyalty, marketing, trust