Today’s Crash Course in Content Marketing is all about making your content fascinating and fun to read. You can have a lovely-to-look-at blog or a newsletter that you send out to thousands of addresses, but if it isn’t any good, you’re pretty much dead in the water. We happen to think you can have it all: good-looking, well-distributed and substance-filled. So how do we give our content marketing depth, character and must-read qualities?
First of all, remember this: We may be “content marketing,” but what we shouldn’t be doing is selling. Or at the very least not pushing or hard-selling. Branded content doesn’t need to pummel followers over the head, screaming “PLEASE BUY ME!!!”-type messages. In fact, pushy, sales-driven content drives consumers and web traffic away from us and not toward us. Instead, teach your readers something. Introduce them to a video they’ve never seen, make them laugh during an article, outline some industry-insider tips in a blog post or create entertaining infographics. This “more flies with honey” theory works nearly every time with content marketing.
Secondly, much of enticing an audience in content marketing begins with dynamic, grab-you-by-the-throat headlines. There are literally thousands of blog posts on the Internet which claim to have the secret of writing these types of headlines. Read some — or all! — of them if you like. But know this: A headline that accurately describes your blog, email marketing efforts or article while managing to be entertaining or memorable is magical thing, indeed.
Yet it’s what’s beyond your terrific headline that separates content ninjas from mere mortals. Good content should be timely. Good content should be newsworthy on its own. But mainly, good content should have something to say. Fill your content with the things people are talking about in your industry while offering your own unique take. Use content to show off your services and products while talking about what is important to your organization. Essentially, let your content tell your story in a million different ways. Each article, blog post, podcast, what-have-you has the chance to show off your company’s substance and mission statement.
Tomorrow we wrap up our mini-cram session on content marketing with a chat about where to market all this meaty goodness!
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