How to Create Reactive Content That Engages Your Audience

The campaign, which was called Elton John Lewis, consisted of:

• Television campaign
• Social media campaign with the hashtag #EltonJohnLewis
• Traditional PR campaign
• Content marketing campaign
• In-store advertising – the brand even recreated part of the set from the advert in their Oxford Street Store

The campaign was a central part of the annual marketing calendar of the company. As a business strategy, it required a considerable investment of human and financial resources.

Reactive Marketing: News & Current Events

Reactive marketing based on news and current events generally involves less planning and is rarely part of a campaign. For example, as the John Lewis Christmas campaign was running, the marketing department at supermarket brand Lidl (who had their own Christmas campaign) sent this tweet in response.

The tweet performed great, despite it being a fairly on-the-spot reaction to the John Lewis ad. Despite costing little to create, it generated significant reach for Lidl with their target audience.

While you can generate exposure from this type of content with your target audience, the trade-off is that the execution is more time-sensitive, and content generated quickly can be risky. The remainder of this guide will focus on how to create reactive content in the best possible way, for the best possible results.

How to develop a reactive marketing strategy

There are four steps that your marketing department needs to go through to create reactive content effectively. They are as follows:

1. Set guidelines for the kind of content your department can produce
2. Create a system for identifying possible topics for reactive marketing
3. Develop your content marketing angle for the content
4. React faster than your competitors to the marketing opportunity

As you can see, the fundamentals of a reactive marketing strategy are simple. It is in the execution where most people stumble. Let’s dive into those steps.

1. Reactive content guidelines are essential

There is often a difference between how you imagine a marketing campaign will be received and the way the public reacts. Sometimes a marketing campaign can be so poorly received that it damages a brand.

These types of marketing mishaps are more likely to occur with rushed content produced to a tight deadline. For example, here’s a reactive and famously ill-considered tweet to get you thinking.

The above tweet, which was intended as a tribute but went down terribly, was deleted shortly after being posted. The brand had to apologize.

Offensive marketing can cause damage to a brand long after the campaign has ended. The example above was published three years ago, and yet it’s still being rolled out as an example of disastrous reactive marketing.

There are some easy things you can do to guard against such mishaps. To reduce the risk of offending your audience, avoid any topic that includes death, destruction, devastation, or politics, unless there’s a very good reason not to. You’d be amazed at how many bad reactive marketing stunts fall into the above categories.

2. Finding opportunities for reactive content creation

Teams who want to embrace reactive content must always be on the lookout for potential opportunities, since timing is such an important factor.

To ensure no opportunities are missed, the team must be open to lots of different sources and be able to identify the topics or events that could form the basis of their next viral social post. Here are a few ways they could prepare:

• Set up a custom feed of news from your brand’s vertical using BuzzSumo, to make sure no big industry stories or trends are missed
• Keeping an eye on trending lists across Twitter and the top posts on relevant subreddits, as well as the front page itself, to look out for large scale trends
• Monitor online conversation around your brand as well as your competitors, and create email alerts so the team can react to big stories around the competition (where relevant)

3. Developing your content marketing angle

A large portion of successful marketing on social media relies on comic timing. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that you can teach. All the same, using humor can lead to great results.

Below is an excellent retro example.