Content marketing for action – by Raunak Chaudhari
Some marketing campaigns are like fireworks. They light up the sky, grab everyone’s attention, and then fade away, leaving barely a trace behind. I’ve been there — carefully crafted messages and days spent on production for a bunch of likes and shares, that barely made much impact on lead gen. Marketers and/or our clients often mistake viral moments for marketing success. The real challenge isn’t capturing attention, but transforming that attention into deliberate action across the customer journey.
We sometimes forget longer term goals in chasing immediate results. Because, of course, immediate results always shut our clients up — whether they are businesses seeking revenue or internal clients within your company. And that often leaves us with incentivized buying, sales boosters, and other short term offers. Take a step back and most of these campaigns often end up looking like scattered attempts with unfocused messaging.
I recently came across early drafts of an old campaign I’d worked on – you know, one of those clever social media ideas that “performed better than all our past posts”. The metrics looked fantastic on paper: engagement through the roof, the most re-shares we ever had, and countless resulting impressions. Yet when I dug deeper into the long-term impact, I didn’t find much.
The real power lies in creating content that sparks the right action at the right time. It’s about understanding that different stages of the customer journey need different types of content – not just the attention-grabbing kind. Remember the marketing funnel?
But wait, you might say, what about a brand like Red Bull? They create random extreme sport videos right? They get a lot of views and their brand does pretty well too?
Two inconvenient things. You’re probably not working with the kind of marketing budget Red Bull works with. They’ve got an F1 team with their name on it. And, you’re probably not trying to keep an association with creative, adventurous, extreme sports image top of mind… so that you’re the brand people think of when they jump off a perfectly good plane with a GoPro strapped to your wrist. Especially not when your viral content is a collection of reaction videos and a group of Gen Z employees dancing.
The problem with my campaign (mentioned earlier) wasn’t just its fleeting nature; it was that we had no clear path forward for all those engaged viewers. No next step that made sense, no valuable information that would help them make decisions. We had their attention, but we hadn’t given them a reason to stay.
Think of the funnel. If you’re just introducing your brand to a new audience, you’ll probably prioritize visibility and storytelling before anything else. Building a sense of connection – whatever shape or form that may be – becomes the most important thing here. Simply put, you do not want to ask your audience to commit to your brand before you even become likeable to them. Make the ask small here. A newsletter subscription, perhaps, instead of “give me your money”. Next, you’ll want to nurture that connection. Dive deeper into the story, differentiate, educate, let them know and understand what makes you distinctly you – and, why that’s valuable. Make your content genuinely useful to the audience. Give them reasons to keep coming back. Once the people that you want to reach are, in fact, onboard on your story, it is simply a matter of being present, and giving them a small push needed to make a purchase decision.
Each piece of content needs to be a deliberate step toward a business outcome, whether that’s capturing leads, nurturing prospects, or closing deals. It has nothing (okay, maybe a little more than nothing) to do with how exiting your content is – it is about being purposeful. That viral video might get thousands of shares, but what happens next? Where does your audience go from there?
I’ve started asking different questions now when planning content. Instead of “Will this get us reach?” and “How many shares might this generate?” I ask “What action do we want our audience to take after engaging with this?” Sometimes that means creating content that might not set social media on fire but generates leads that are actually interested in what you’re offering.
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