Are You Taking the Opportunity to Engage?

Everyone understands the conventional measures of Opportunities to See (OTS) and Opportunities to Hear (OTH) in traditional media. Equally everyone understands page impressions in a digital context. Yet, what clients really want to measure is the Opportunities to Engage (OTE) – to see their audience is taking positive action to interact with them. 

This inspired the creation of Realia Marketing's bespoke content model, Opportunities to Engage (OTE). OTE is the action of us writing engaging content, and delivering and re-engineering it as appropriate via social media, PR, search engine optimisation and e-marketing for our clients. The positioning for OTE is both emotive and rational. From an emotional perspective, it is ‘Be Compelling!’ We can capture people with creativity and convince them with content. Rationally there are several benefits to the OTE model – consistency of message, utilisation of resource, reduced impact on management time and of course, value for money. Furthermore, by recruiting ‘Content Champions’ within our clients’ businesses, who are specialists and can give us real insight, we ensure the content we create is diverse, authentic and accurate, while enabling business advocates to see their thought leading thinking realised. 

The power of content is still somewhat underestimated and it can even feel intimidating to those who do not know where to start with content generation and outreach. The benefits you ask? Here we explore… 

Content requires nurturing on its journey to completion. It takes time and effort from getting the brief right, to gaining internal approvals and reaching a final written piece. So, why waste the opportunity to only use it once? 

Content shouldn’t be seen as disposable after being shared once. It has many purposes and can be re-engineered to work across different platforms. Let’s take an example; you’ve launched a new product and we have written a press release about the news. This content can be restructured and built upon to create user case studies, a thought leadership piece, a research white paper, blogs about the different product benefits, interviews with your experts, or even a response to an existing news article (we call it news-hopping!). 

Furthermore there is presenting this news on social media, which doesn’t have to stop with words; we could use testimonials, infographics, moving images (GIFs), videos and more! Another extension to these mediums would be e-marketing – communicating your news with your contacts with specific messages catered to potential, past and present customers.

Lastly, your website should become a central promotional spot for your new product. Optimise the key words used about the news on your website, through organic and paid activity, so that Google can help direct customers to your content if they’ve searched the same key words. Quite remarkable how far one piece of content can go, huh? You won’t want to waste it again!

It’s hard to reach all of your target audience in just one place. Whilst you likely know the profile of your customer base, everybody has different preferences. For example, Steve might prefer reading a glossy magazine, use LinkedIn and rarely checks his emails. Whereas John may be more digitally savvy - reading online blogs, constantly scrolling through his Twitter feed and someone who uses Google search religiously. So, as you can imagine from the different channels you could pursue with your content, you could be missing a trick if you don’t see the value in re-engineering it for all relevant platforms! Increasing your reach of message ultimately means more impressions, clicks and a bigger opportunity to engage. 

The beauty of the digital world is that it allows target audiences to engage more directly with us, and with each other. Better yet, you can easily measure the results of marketing activities. Results Realia can expect to monitor from content delivery are; social media engagement, press coverage, organic website traffic, search engine ranking, email conversion rates and more. Whilst we can also easily gain feedback about the content we’ve published, build and engage brand advocacy from satisfied customers, and better develop relationships with target audiences. This data driven insight is invaluable to shape future marketing activity and better yet allows you to demonstrate a return-on-investment to your boss and finance colleagues!