Learn how to leverage trending events to market your brand.  Drive real results that meet your content marketing KPIs by using these three main strategies.

✒️ Paul Rigden

The concept behind reactive marketing is pretty simple: engage your followers by posting content reacting to brand-relevant, trending events.  But actually making it happen takes a little bit of strategy.  The first question people usually ask right after learning about reactive marketing is the same:

"How does it work?  How do I use reactive marketing to hit my KPIs?"

Whether your brand is offering products, services, or your goals are more engagement focused, every professional marketer is looking to hit KPIs.  Views don’t matter if they don’t impact your bottom line, and we all know audience engagement doesn’t automatically translate into conversions.  So how do reactive marketers close that gap?  One of the most effective ways is by implementing a conversion funnel through the 3 pillars of reactive marketing: Web Content, Social Media, and Email Marketing.  You probably know reactive marketing is about reacting to trending events (check out our article here for a catch up on the basics), and when it comes to trends, time matters.  When setting up your conversion funnel for web, social, and email, you don’t want to just think about what you should be doing, but when.

Start the reactive marketing by detecting an event that will engage your users, using research and brainstorming tools to find what you have to say, and then getting web content live as soon as possible.

The first and most critical pillar of your funnel is web content.  For most brands, their website is the most accessible and immersive platform they have.  It’s generally where you’ll host all your conversion elements, and it’s one of the first places users will think of in connection to your brand identity.  By hosting a blog, newsletter, or resource section to your website, you can easily create a space for people to interact with your brand in a less promotional, more engagement-friendly way.

The most important thing to think about when creating your web content, is whether it clearly communicates your point of view.  People don’t just want an AI copy of a news article, they want a point of view they can relate to on the issues that matter most to them.  AI and content generation tools are very powerful, but they can’t do all the work for you.  Leverage them to their fullest to quickly do a deep dive into each trending event to develop a nuanced and insightful opinion.  What are other people saying about the event?  What do the facts support?  Asking these questions, and using AI to do a little research, only takes a few minutes and will turn your content from AI slop to quality, engaging content.  If you’re not inspired after a quick research session, move on.  If you don’t care enough about an issue to really say something, then people won’t respond to it.

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Once you’ve generated your content, make sure you’ve incorporated your conversion elements on-site.  Each article isn’t just a piece of content, it’s a landing page.  If you’re expressing yourself on brand-relevant issues, each piece of content is going to offer opportunities to inform users about what your brand has to offer.  Whether that’s from internal links to product or service pages, well placed promotional banners, or offers for VIP deals and subscription content (strongly recommended), make sure that each web article you post provides a strong anchor to your brand’s conversion points.

Web Content Marketing Basics:

So, if you’re still following along, you’ve got your website, blog, or newsletter, as well as some engaging and trending content live and ready.  How do you get people to read it?  The good news is that if you’ve done a good job honing a strong point of view on a trending event, then your article has all the basic pre-requisites of a viral social post, which will bring you to the second pillar of the reactive marketing funnel.

Social media loves a good hot take. Brands struggle to grow their social presence because they don’t understand what they need to be doing to connect with people through the social medium. Think of social networks like a lake that’s a mile wide but only a few inches deep.  The coverage of any message you send will be large, but the attention your message gets will be shallow.  Users get bored easily, so having a diverse mix of social posts, as well as a clear and identifiable point of view,  is critical to growing a strong following.  Using trending events that impact your audience is the best way to turn your social feed from a one-note marketing channel to something users will want to follow and engage with. 

In the first 24 - 72 hours after posting your web content, you’ve got to get the word out on social media.  The biggest key to social media marketing is consistency.  Both in terms of regularly posting content, as well as having a consistent and identifiable brand identity.  People resonate with like-minded opinions, so by regularly posting thoughts and reactions that reflect your world view, you can attract an audience over time.

It’s a simple process:

By implementing the first two pillars of the reactive marketing funnel, you should have your bases mostly covered, but you’ll still be leaving something on the table unless you’re also thinking about the third pillar of the funnel, email marketing.

In the 3 to 14 days after you post your web content, you should be thinking about using email marketing to broadcast your most successful content.  Anyone who’s posting regular content and using analytics is going to have some articles which land particularly strongly with their audience.  Hosting an email newsletter, VIP membership, or similar sign-up based content and special offer program allows you to put the best foot forward with the broadest possible audience by featuring your best content.  Think of an reactive email marketing campaign like a greatest hits album featuring all your best performing hits.

Start by implementing an email sign up form and account management plug-in on your website.  You’ll also need a transactional email service like MailChimp, which will help you manage and send out emails at scale.  Email marketing is all about combining scale and targeting.  Use analytics to track how your most valued users interact with your site.  What are their favorite products or services?  What follow up conversion opportunities are most appropriate for them?  Through email marketing platforms with features like merge tags and elements, you can automatically promote the most targeted products, services, and messages to each individual user.  Combining the necessary technologies like website plugins, analytics implementations, and transactional email platforms makes email marketing the last and most advanced pillar of the reactive marketing funnel, but it’s also the one that can drive the deepest conversions.

One of the worst mistakes marketers can make is to go to the work of crafting a successful campaign, only to miss out on hard-earned conversions because of poor analytics and user targeting.  Understanding the basics of tracking events and conversions is an easy way to make sure you’re making the most out of your audience.

Learn more about Targeting and Analytics in the next edition of The Content Marketer’s Guide to AI: Why analytics and targeting are a game changer