The key to effective content marketing is keeping it fresh.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways your can promote your business online. The Internet is flooded with sales and SPAM and other junk. Don’t wade into those polluted waters. Instead, provide value to your audience. Educate, collaborate, be generous with your knowledge. Once you’ve built a good relationship with the people in your target market, then you can offer your products or services as a solution to what they need.
With that in mind, how do you stand out in the content marketing world. After all, you’re not the only one out there offering content and trying to communicate to your audience. How do you create unique, memorable and, most important, useful content that will help endear your target market to you? Well, here are 3 ideas that you can use to freshen up your content marketing.
Use short form video
Effective marketing means making a message as easy to process as possible. While video is very dynamic, it is a linear format that requires attention and the cessation of other tasks to fully absorb. Longer-form videos can be great for “how-to” explanations, case studies, even some testimonials. But don’t forget about those shorter, easier-to-digest video snippets. For example, you can embed gifs or Vine videos into social posts or emails. These formats play automatically and don’t need much time to absorb. You’re not asking your audience to actually click the play button and sit there watching your video for several minutes. Think of short-form video as a way to share quick hits, little messages, reminders and entertaining tidbits that your audience will enjoy. In the age of quick, on-the-go scrolling these gifs and Vines can keep you relevant as your audience members zip through their daily online lives.
Be original on social
Social media is an irreplaceable part of today’s marketing mix, but using it solely as an advertising venue may do more harm than good. Because of relentlessness of so many company’s social marketing campaigns, there’s a growing user fatigue and a diminishing return for promotion through social channels. After all, people are on social media to catch up with friends and family, read some news and stay up on their favorite topics – not necessarily to shop or buy products. So, when promoting your business on social media, be original, be fun, be engaging. Look to provide value instead of always selling.
When you do have something to promote, do it in a fun way that engages your audience, instead of simply saying, “Buy from me.” For example, instead of a simple hashtag campaign, consider a themed one, like inviting people to take a photo with the product and including a hashtag for a chance to win a prize. Or you could invite people to participate with your posts by sharing stories on a particular topic. You can also tie into seasonal events, like asking your fans to share their Christmas shopping nightmares or best budget summer vacation ideas. Even when using these techniques, keep the promotional stuff sparse so that audiences don’t get weary or find your updates too gimmicky.
Also, remember to balance your social posts between communication and promotion. Remember the 10-4-1 rule: For every 15 posts, 10 should link to useful sources of content that your audience would enjoy. Four should link to your content, like blog posts, videos or published articles that your team created. And once should direct them to a sales offer or landing page. Sure, you can fudge these ratios a little bit, but if you skew too far in the direction of promotion, people will tune you out.
Invoke feeling
For an overall campaign strategy, try selling a holistic lifestyle in concrete terms, not just abstract fantasy ones, by placing ads for things the products could be used in. For example, if the product is a food item, advertise recipes using the kind of tone and atmosphere the recipe is supposed to invoke. Provide customers with a lot of resources on your website to promote the kind of lifestyle you are trying to sell. Make your site a consumer-attracting hub that is rich with information centered on that specific lifestyle, that overall feeling, that you want your brand to convey.
Want more? Check our some of our free resources on social media marketing and online marketing 101.
