Content Marketing Step 5: Manage the content conversation

Once the content is launched, there are three levels of conversation management needed. The first one is to observe, the second one is to facilitate, the third one is to join. This is a gradual process, and the lines between the levels will probably blurr during the process. That is not a problem.

Observe

Listen to reactions on your content. See what people share. By observing which stories share better than others, you learn how to improve your content creation process. Install real-time monitoring tools to follow up on your content marketing.

You can use these three success parameters:

• Reach of content sharing: How many people are consuming your content?
• Sentiment of content: Are people positive, neutral or negative about your content?
• Impact of content: Is the opinion of people towards your company improving due to your content?

Facilitate

Facilitating goes beyond adding a ‘share’ button to your content. It implies helping your existing community to spread your content. Make sure everything you produce is available digitally so people who like it can easily share it.

Facilitating also implies influencers’ management. Know who the influencers are for your industry. Connect with them. The moment you have relevant content, you should proactively share it with these people. If the quality of your content is high and the way it is presented is great, they will be more than happy to share it with their network. This enables you to reach out to new contacts and thus achieve the objectives of your content marketing strategy.

Join

The last step in managing your content conversation is actively joining in. Most companies are good at being responsive in their conversation management. Responsive implies that questions and remarks towards the content are answered positively, openly and professionally. Being responsive is great, but it is not sufficient. Joining the conversation also implies being proactive. When people in your network are talking about certain topics that fit with your content marketing, you can approach them and share your content proactively. The only way to implement this successfully is if your content is extremely relevant for these people. If the relevance is average or low, it will feel like spam.