The current pandemic situation prompted me to ask the question: What is content marketing for?

Earlier, content marketing was about grabbing attention—if you were able to catch attention of a few moments, mission accomplished! In a post covid world, that’s still necessary, but it’s not the only criteria. Content marketing has a new mandate. In the never normal, it’s not just about grabbing attention but engaging the audience.

The real results we seek from campaigns happen when people engage and share the content. As marketeers, we spend a lot of time thinking about brand awareness, but that’s a proxy for what we really want: brand affinity.

So how do we then focus on what we really want? We want people to hold the attention of our target audience and engage them. If we are able to crack that piece of the puzzle then everything else we’re trying to achieve gets easier.

In 2020, I experimented with making branded shows. I compiled a list of marketing experts and created a video interview knowledge series to gain their insights & perspectives on marketing in the never normal.

I discovered that when you make a podcast or video series, you’re expressly focused on holding attention, and not merely grabbing it.

The key to holding attention is to provide your audience with a worthwhile experience. Knowledge video series are a good vehicle for doing that.

Videos help marketers create compounding returns on our content investment, since they tend to go viral. They also allow for more efficiency as these interviews can be broken into smaller bits of content & promoted further-thereby increasing the content life of the asset.

In the end, when we hold attention and engage our target audience, the lifetime value of our audience goes up, while our cost of customer acquisition goes down thanks to the virality of the content.

So my 3 tips to engaging your audience with content marketing would be:

Don’t make more “pieces” of disjointed content. Make a series.

Don’t just focus on grabbing attention. Focus on holding it.

Don’t just fixate on lead generation. Care about lead nurturing.