Your RSS Strategy Is Critical to Your Overall Marketing Strategy
The problem with RSS in most marketing plans is that the marketer doesn’t really go beyond providing a simple RSS feed for your brand news. To get started the right way you need to segment RSS as a critical element of your overall content placement strategy. Your RSS Marketing strategy shouldn’t just indiscriminately push content, but carefully serve in delivering to the content preferences of your audiences.
The right way to go, even if you’re only starting out with a simple RSS strategy, is to provide individual RSS feeds for:
- Your individual target (A) audiences,
- Your different (T) types of content and,
- Even your different content (T) topics.
Think of this as a suggested list of how to develop your RSS strategy.
Target Audiences
Start by listing the target audiences you want to deliver your content to via RSS. Each of your audiences has different content needs, resulting in different groups of RSS feeds that need to be created for these target audiences. One group for the media, the other for your employees, the other for the general public, the other for your existing customers and so on. You can even go further and divide your master groups in sub-groups, based on their prevailing interests.
Content Types
Now consider the different types of content you want to deliver to these audiences. For example your latest news, your blog posts, your how-to articles, your press releases, your podcasts, the latest posts from your forums, direct communications messages and so on. In most cases these types of content don’t mix well together. If someone wants to receive your blog updates, which are full of your company representatives’ personal opinions and commentary, they don’t necessarily want to receive your corporate-speak press releases.
If someone is interested in what’s happening in your forum and what the latest forum posts are, they don’t want to receive your how-to articles in the same RSS feed, simply because these two types of content are so much different. Essentially, you will need to provide separate feeds for each of the different content types, and you will need to determine what content types you wish to deliver to each of your target audience groups and sub-groups.
Content Topics
Finally take a look at each individual content type for each individual target audience and further break that down by content topic, if needed. And if you’re trying to cover many different topics for each content type, you will need to provide different RSS feeds for these different topics, because, again, people interested in topic A are not necessarily also interested in topic B.
While this may sound complicated, it’s really simple once you start doing it. The point is, this is about giving your subscribers choice of what they subscribe to. Instead of forcing them to subscribe to everything, deliver the flexibility for them to customize their experience with our brand’s content. In this way, your content becomes more valuable and interesting to your audience.
