Do you remember the first article about “the social media content strategy based on your flywheel stages”? Well, as promised, here comes the second one about the second inbound marketing phase: the engagement. In this article, we will talk about 3 important slices of the pie:  

• The objectives to achieve 
• The type of content to provide and the tactics 
• Some important metrics to track at this stage  

But first, let’s start by clarifying what the “engagement phase is”.

Did you say “engagement”?

Don’t get me wrong. I know that in inbound marketing, there is the attract, the engagement, the conversion, and the retention phases. So “why are you only talking about three phases?”, would you ask me? Because I’ve decided that, in this second phase, I consider the  “engagement” as well as the “conversions”. Conversions are only a higher degree of engagement, right?

But anyway. The engagement is the moment where your visitors turn into potential customers. Meaning that they already know you. And thanks to the educational content you sent to them, they do not only know you exist, they remember you. If you did your job very well, they also know they are suffering at some points. How will you then be able to ENGAGE those people and manage to make them do what you want? Keep providing them with the content they need but with a higher degree of personalization, and the right Call-To-Action.  

Because now, it’s time for your visitors to become QUALIFIED leads. Therefore, you need to understand what a “Marketing Qualified lead” is.  And you need to figure out who is, and who is not.  

On Social Media like on any other channel, you need data to do this.  

How to clearly define my objectives?  

Before talking about the type of content you can use, let’s look at your objectives. 

If I have one advice for you it’s: “don’t go blind”. That’s a reality : if you want to be successful in your inbound methodology, set up your objectives per phase. Here is for you, the recap of what you should focus on the engagement phase:  

Content that suits the phase and the audience 

Once you have a clear view on what you want to achieve in this phase, you can start to think about the content you need. Indeed, you still want to provide content that helps your audience. Keep focusing on pain points, but also provide the first solutions. Based on what you already know about your audience, start personalizing the information you provide. Experiment with A/B testing, and stay focused on the real interests of your leads.

lBut everything has a price. In the engagement phase, you ask people to give you the data you need to qualify them. Each field that must be filled should help you to categorize the leads, to create groups, segments and audiences.  

Digging in the data from your attract (awareness) phase on social media, you rebuild audiences based on: 

• Gender
• Age
• Behavior
• Interests
• Job
• Education 
• How many time people have watched your videos
• People who’ve seen your videos more than X times 
• You will need to install a pixel to track visitors from your social ads to your website, and retarget them after. You want to be aware of the people who clicked more than X time on your post and came often on a specific page of your website!
  

With those tactics, you will create very personalized content and most of all, highly valuable. Plus, you will never lose the contact with your leads or customers.  

How to analyze my results?  

We know that filtering the good from the bad metrics can be difficult. Therefore, we created for you a table to recap the important metrics to analyze when you are running campaigns in the engagement phase on social media. 

 This is obviously only one piece of the success of your content marketing strategy on Social Media. At Minds&More, we believe that a real content strategy must imply an omnichannel view and strategy. With a clear message, and always focusing on how to really help the customer.