Your RSS Marketing Strategy: Deciding How To Deliver Your RSS
Content by Rok Hrastnik
Copyright 2006 Rok Hrastnik
You're interested in RSS marketing, but there either seem to be so many options
of how to do it or you've only ever come accross simple RSS feeds that just
don't seem to be the approach you're looking for.
The problem with most RSS marketing plans is that the marketer doesn't really
go beyond providing a simple RSS feed for all of his online news or his blog.
But since you've been reading this column for a while now you know for a fact
that RSS offers so much more.
To get started the right way you need to correctly plan your RSS Marketing
strategy, starting by deciding how you are going to deliver your RSS content.
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 audiences, --> your different types of content
and --> even your different content topics.
Think of this as a consequtive 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 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. And
so on. 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 neccessarily 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, allow them to
subscribe to only what they want and need.
Quite simple, right?
Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense,
keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.
Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one
target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content
topic for that target audience.
DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT
Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are
going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is
especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get
started with RSS publishing
ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS
This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the
needs of all of your target audiences at once or publishing multiple topical
RSS feeds, which always remain the same. The easiest to do, can be done with
any RSS publishing tool on the market ...
CUSTOMIZABLE RSS FEEDS
The more and more complex you get with the different feeds you're offering, the
more difficult it is for your visitors to select what exactly they want, simply
because an individual subscriber might be interested in 10 of your 100 feeds,
but he doesn't want to be subscribed to that many feeds by your company.
In this case the best way to go is to also offer your visitors the opportunity
to customize your RSS feed they decide exactly what content type and content
topics they want to receive in one or a few RSS feeds they'll be subscribing
from you.
The opportunities here are quite endless, as you can allow them to customize
their feeds based on topics, content types, authors and more.
If this is the way you need to go because you are offering so much content via
your RSS feeds that it makes it difficult for someone to subscribe to only one
or a few feeds from you, you will need your RSS publishing solution to support
feed customization.
SEARCH-BASED RSS FEEDS
Search-based RSS feeds are a subset of customizable RSS feeds, and they work
just like a search engine. You type in a certain keyword or keyword
combinations and the search engine gives you the most relevant or the latest
results for that keyword combination.
You can do the same with RSS, allowing your visitors to enter specific keywords
and then get the content from you only based on those keywords.
PERSONALIZED RSS FEEDS
Giving users the choice to customize the content they are receiving from you is
one thing, but certain content may actually demand you to personalize the feed
using your subscribers personal information.
The most basic variation, used to lift response, is addressing your subscribers
by name or using other data about the customer from your database, such as his
address, previous purchases etc.
In other cases a bank might want to deliver information directly relating to
your bank account, directly via RSS, such as your latest credit card
transactions, and so on.
RSS FEEDS WITH CONTENT TARGETING
Now imagine that you want to create individualized campaigns to individual
subscribers, based on the information you already have in your database about
their activities, demographics and so on, for example to send a promotion for
product A only to those subscribers that might be most interested in product A.
In this case you will need an RSS solution that can pull this data from your
database and then segment your subscribers based on the actual data.
AUTORESPONDER RSS FEEDS
Since their introduction, e-mail autoresponders have become a relatively
mainstream internet direct marketing tool, although they haven't really made
their way to the world of public relations.
The concept is simple a certain action by your visitors on your website
triggers a sequence of e-mail messages, delivered to that visitor, provided you
have his e-mail address, over a period of several days.
Direct marketers use this to automatically communicate with the prospect after
a certain action, trying to get him to do what they want.
The most common application is offering your visitors a free report, delivered
to them via e-mail. After subscribing they start receiving consequtive parts of
the report day after day or a every few days, receiving both new information as
well as being exposed to the marketer's promotional message.
Other applications include autoresponder messages in relation to transactional
e-mail:
--> Subscribe to a free e-mail newsletter. The first autoresponder message
thanks you for the subscription and also gives you access to one of the
newsletter issues. A couple of days later, while you're still "hot as a lead",
you receive another e-mail, pertaining to the newsletter topic, giving you more
advice or information on the topic and trying achieve a sales conversion. And
so on.
--> Complete a webstore order. The first message thanks you for the purchase
and recommends an additional product at a lower price. The second message tells
you more about the product you purchased. The third messages makes a special
additional purchase offer. The fourths message gives you some great additional
tips, and so on.
--> Start an online order, but don't finish it. The first message reminds
you that there are still products in your shopping cart. The second message
reminds you again, giving you added inscentive to complete the order. And so on
...
The opportunities are practically limitless, but you get the picture.
Now simply transform this concept into the realm of RSS.
Someone subscribes to your RSS feed. The first couple of content items,
spread-out through the first week, serve as a series of welcome messages giving
the new subscriber access to your top content and inviting him to actively
participate. Your latest feed updates come through as well, but your new
subscriber also gets the extra treatment (content) in the same feed.
And now apply this to anything you're doing with RSS, where it makes sense to
follow-up with additional information to your new subscribers once they
subscribe, of course depending on the feed topic and target audience.
Very few RSS tools today offer autoresponder capabilities, but some do.
TO RECAP...
Think of your RSS publishing strategy and try to establish which of the these
publishing models your RSS publishing tool should support:
--> Topical or Target Audience Oriented RSS Feeds --> Customizable RSS
Feeds --> Search-Based RSS Feeds --> Personalized RSS Feeds --> RSS
Feeds With Content Targeting --> Autoresponder RSS Feeds
About the Author
Get the easy way to mastering RSS marketing today. Click here now to get all the
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