One of our recent articles offered advice on how to grow your audience through content marketing. But what if your products or services aren’t particularly “entertaining” in the first place and you’re stuck for ideas? Here are some tips that can help.
Bridging the gap with content marketing
Analogies help communicate a complex or unfamiliar concept by likening it to something that is familiar to that audience or the wider public. It’s a great way to bridge the gap between what you’re promoting and who you’re trying to promote it to. And that can only be a good thing for your brand.
In this piece, we take content marketing ideas from our original post and use some of our favourite flicks to illustrate each point.
Find the right balance
Creating great content is about finding that place between your passion and your audience’s interests so that you can confidently create something of value.
Generating great content that appeals to your audience requires considerable practice, patience and focus. OK, maybe not to the extent of catching flies with chopsticks or obsessively waxing a car, but keep up the efforts and you’re well on your way to mastering the art.
Stop obsessing
It’s not about “going viral”…If you change your focus from “going viral” to “creating good work,” you begin to do things differently and are then more likely to get the shares you’re after.
Avoid being precious about your content reaching as many people as possible: fixating on those sorts of things can turn ugly. Real ugly. It’s more important for it to reach the right people and that will come from the quality of your work.
Create a connection
The most-shared content causes a strong connection in the reader, igniting one of six key emotions: surprise, fear, joy, sadness, anger or disgust. That doesn’t mean you have to try and get a reaction from everything you produce. A key piece thrown into the mix will boost your audience and get them interested in your other content.
The tone of content doesn’t always have to be heavy, Doc. You don’t need a flux capacitor, DeLorean and a rather unhealthy relationship with your mother to know that.
Make sure it’s worthwhile
If you’re updating your blog for the sake of keeping it updated then you need to change your perspective. This is supposed to be something of value. Something that you yourself would want to read, watch or interact with…
Indy doesn’t procure any old dusty, rusty or musty artefact: it has to be something of significant value before he gets out of bed to risk life and limb with barrelling boulders, slithery snakes and nefarious Nazis. When it comes to content marketing it’s quality over quantity. Wish they’d heeded that advice for the fourth Indy flick.
Use more visuals
Whether you use pictures, videos, or diagrams, they will literally help illustrate your point… Instagram and Pinterest users spend more time on the site, are more likely to scroll to the end and share more than other users.
Eliminate the fluff
It’s challenging and it definitely takes work, but it makes for better content. Don’t focus on your word count. A longer blog post does not mean a better blog post. And often, keeping a blog post short is more digestible for the mobile user (which is everyone now).
Hasta la vista, lengthy word counts.
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