Magnetic content draws in your audience, influencing them to take action. It resonates with their interests and needs, creating engagement. When executed well, magnetic content becomes a powerful tool for driving results.
When we approach any brief, creating magnetic content is top of mind. What kind of stories can we craft that really cuts through the noise?
Chaser content, on the other hand, chases after the audience with self-centred messaging.
It often resembles marketing materials disguised as digital content and its unlikely to yield the same results without significant overspend in advertising. For clients in this camp, there’s a significant opportunity for improvement.
In order to make your content is magnetic you need to understand your audience. And not at a superficial level, you really, really need to know your target audience.
Strategic communications in the digital era demands that you ruthlessly overlay what your audiences care about with what your companies what to talk about. Mining that overlap is how you provoke action in your comms.
For more companies they need to be doing this much, much more for the LinkedIn posts execs put out, the content on our websites, the emails we’re sending stakeholders and all our non-digital outputs too.
We can’t just produce content and messaging that’s firmly in the ‘about us camp’. That’s a one-way ticket to people not engaging. It might make us feel good when we are producing it. But if there is nothing in it for the audience reading it, they simply won’t engage.
In the words of my mother, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
After audience insight there are four other elements that transform copy from informative to magnetic. When you are tight for time you can sometimes jump to the last question. You need to know how your team is making it engaging.
This could be about the headline, it could be about the trend it’s aligned with, it could be that the topic is so spot on that people are going to flock to it.
Whatever it is, if you are scratching your head to answer this question, you probably have more work to do.
How you know it’s working?
Just like the media agenda moves, digital trends shift at pace. So, your companies aren’t going to get it perfect all the time. That’s why it’s vital you embed in your team a culture of reviewing what’s performing well and what’s not performing. Test and learn, test and learn.
In the digital era it easy to get fixated of vanity metric. How many people are landing on our website? How many people are opening emails or reading your exec LinkedIn post?
All of those measures are just sign posts to see if you are heading in the right direction of achieving your business results. If you view them as that, you’re all good.
But it’s vital that you remember that the bee all and end all is whether you company is achieving the business results it needs to.
So, you need things like favourability surveys, stakeholder audits and qualitative data to know exactly how communications are supporting business objectives.
The output metrics of digital communications are just sign posts giving you a sense of whether you are heading in the right direction on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. But without wrap around measurement tools, and clear business results tracking, you just don’t know.
When your signposts are indicating things are working, then the old adage of repeat, repeat, repeat stands true even more online. You are only going to have a short window when something works exceptionally well.
So, cook that carrot 12 ways and more, and know that when we are starting to get tired of our own key messages, we’re not even halfway there. But the format is probably already stale.
Pead creating Magnetic Content
Our unique combination of industry-leading communications and digital marketing skills, enables us to develop content that audiences want to engage with.
We ruthlessly overlay what clients’ target audiences’ care about, with what our clients need to talk about – that’s how we find the sweet spot.
This magnetic content enables us to produce cost effective campaigns that deliver results – time and time again.
Our PR and digital marketing consultants work hand in hand on client work, as one team. It means clients don’t need to brief in two teams and we deliver cost efficiencies.
It also means we naturally find ways to leverage PR, content and digital work to build more engaging 360º campaigns that deliver strong business results.
PR and digital marketing are a perfect combination for brands. That’s because mainstream media drives awareness and search behaviour, and digital content provides leads with context that motivates them to give us their details and convert.
This blog post is snapshot of a much larger presentation Louisa gave in May 2024. If you’re interested in finding out more about Strategic communications in the digital era, don’t hesitate to contact Louisa directly on louisa.kraitzick@pead.co.nz.
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