Photo Credit: SuperHypeBlog
Pop-up ads are out. The debate about the true effectiveness of a well placed banner rages tirelessly on. You know you’ve heard it being touted around the digital marketing sphere: Content marketing is the new black.
It seems what every future-leaning business is trying to emulate is the brand-turned-publisher approach of executing an advertising strategy. With this shift in mindset from traditional to native ads (advertorials, sponsored content, etc), it’s unsurprising that – just like subtle product placement in movies or on TV – strategically embedding links in relevant, engaging content is far more effective in adding value to the user experience over the blatant promotion of your product.
What I’m getting at is that a well thought out content marketing strategy put proactively to work can be a powerful relationship-building and brand positioning tool.
Remember: your end goal here should be building engagement and using that to boost your bottom line across your conversion funnel. Do not indulge in obvious self-promotion. Never resort to hard-selling tactics. Prioritize relationships over transactions. Quality and value are key; making the customer experience as fun, frictionless and interactive as possible are your primary objectives.
Turning Water Into Wine
Why are you trying to write content and what are you trying to achieve from it? The obvious first step in deciding what information to prioritize sharing with your audience is asking yourself the following: Does it align with your brand narrative? Is it relevant to your product or service? Does it add value? Next, ask yourself, do you want to establish yourself or your business as a thought leader in your industry? Assume your audience is hearing what you have to say for the first time. Presenting information that is easily understood from a layman’s perspective is inherently easier to remember and instantly more share-worthy. It’s basic human nature to gravitate towards what’s easiest to remember and partake in what people tend to have similar or polarizing opinions about.
Putting It Out There: Effective Content Distribution
Once you have your content ready to go and a communication schedule or broader game plan in place, distribution is usually the next hurdle. Here, it’s important to remember to use social to re-enforce content, and not the other way around. Effective content distribution is a crucial factor in controlling how existing or new customers interact with your brand. Think: Halo Effect. You come to love and trust the brands you’re most familiar with. Similarly, when you really really like one aspect of a product, you tend to hold a positive predisposition towards everything else that it offers and derive more value in sharing it. And vice versa.
Re-Purpose Existing Content to Optimize Your ROI
Re-purposing existing, archived content that best resonated with your audience is an often overlooked way to boost customers’ engagement with your brand or product. And adding genuine value to the user experience is arguably at the core of truly effective content marketing – a positive user experience can go a long way in building or fuelling your brand presence without much out-of-pocket spend. Leverage this. Here’s a few ways how:
Hub-and-Spoke It – Tweet key takeaways from past articles that were of most interest to or saw the most engagement from your audience. Even going so far as asking for a re-tweet or share can bring surprising results. Ask questions. Reach out to influencers or otherwise recognized experts or authorities in their fields for new perspectives on past projects. Let their legions of followers or site visitors into your circle to add more fuel to your marketing fire.
Visualize Your Content – One of the best ways to optimize content for sharing is to make it visual. Share existing or create custom infographics that are relevant to your content to help simplify concepts and boost engagement across your blog and social media channels.
Break up longer pieces of content into a whole series of blog posts.
Accumulate blocks of posts to use as supporting documents for a whitepaper, put together an e-book or put a face to your ideas by hosting a webinar.
Do you use content marketing for your business? Let us know in the comments below.