This week, we caused a bit of a stir in our office. You see, we’d sent out an email campaign to new prospects. The focus of this week’s campaign was our blog on Donald Trump’s marketing. Why did we do this? Because he’s current, relevant and people have an opinion on him. People feel compelled to read about things they feel strongly about, particularly when it comes to politics. The reaction we got spurred us on to write this blog on why being an opinionated marketer is a good thing.
Opinions get people talking.
Opinions aren’t endorsements or promotions. That is a dangerous game when writing about a topic that your audience are passionate about.
Opinion pieces are designed to get people talking about your buzz topic. If you manage it, pat yourself on the back – you’ve succeeded. The job of a marketer is to make some noise around your chosen subject. Opinionated marketers do this very successfully. Hence why Donald Trump is in the media ALL the time.
Opinionated content gets results.
Of the 4,648 people that opened our email, we got 7 negative responses. Just seven. In comparison to those seven negative responses, we saw the largest amount of identified website visitors on our website EVER. Of these website visitors, 65% were brand new prospects. 75% of those prospects were what we would call “cold leads”, meaning they previously hadn’t engaged with us much until that blog send. Overall, the blog was the top page visited by prospects.
Which leads onto our content strategy…
Opinionated articles are the perfect clickbait
We all know that content can often just be used as clickbait to draw prospects to your website. As our example shows you in the results above, opinionated articles are great for this. But a successful content marketing strategy doesn’t just rely on clickbait. It’s only the first level.
Blogs are considered the ‘intrigue’ level of your content. They are designed to grab people’s attention, introduce your company to a new prospect and make them click! Opinion articles are great at doing this. This level is all about catching new individuals who might be interested in what you have to say, and your business. Attract and cookie as they say. Once you know who these individuals are, you can monitor their web behaviour and start providing them with the content they need to become productive and successful in their career.
So the next stage, ‘discovery’, is all about discovering what your prospects are interested in. This level is about making that connection to what your readers learned in the blog to how they can apply similar tactics and techniques and what they need in place (be that best practice or software) to achieve it. This is where you can start warming up your leads with softer, more informative content, such as your best practice whitepapers and guides.
From there, you can continue moving them through the different levels of content, sending them more hard-hitting content about you (case studies, features, and services work well here) as they continue to show more interest. You can even automate this whole process so that you don’t have to be constantly producing content…but more about that here.
You’re not going to please everyone – that’s just part of being a marketer.
So, now you know that opinionated pieces DO work, and can feed into your content marketing strategy. I bet the only thing that’s niggling at you is this question: “But what if you put prospects off by writing an opinionated piece they don’t agree with?” Honestly, we’ve had worse responses from normal articles.
People tend to get more annoyed when they’re sent the same boring blogs over and over that they never engage with than with an opinion piece that they can comment on, judge and dissect. Don’t be afraid to become an opinionated marketer. After all, we only remember the brands that stand for something (whether we agree with it or not), right Donald?