Successful content marketing needs brilliant, engaging content.

Every single one of your competitors that takes their marketing seriously is now working on their content marketing strategy. As a result, the competition is hottin g up and you need to really get it right if you want to stand out from the rest. This blog post is here to help you to get it right with some simple steps.

Content marketing is recognised as being the way to draw traffic into your site. How do you make your content brilliant and engaging?

Content is the king of todays media world. Consumers crave information. The issue for businesses is creating content that their target audience wish to read. Emails get binned so very easily; but we all still read a few. We read articles when we need advice or we are referred by our peers. What is it that make she difference between a great article we share and all those we ignore?

1. Relevance

Why should your audience care? Does your content make any difference to them? If the answer is no or not sure, you’re missing something. It may be something as simple as an introduction that makes your content relevant. It may be that you need to educate your audience to make it relevant.

2. Attractiveness

So, going beyond relevance, this is the question of whether your audience really cares. Lets face it, even when we should care, sometimes we don’t. Part of that is the packaging. Whether it be the way a message is delivered, how it’s dressed up, what it looks like or even whether it is a path to eternal happiness. How attractive is your message? Remember, attractiveness is in the eye of the beholder, what you consider attractive is not always the same as your target audience. Use focus groups, conduct market research and make sure you know what your audience desires before you begin. It will make the journey easier, less painful and more rewarding.

3. Emotion

Once you’ve caught the right people’s attention, you need to make sure your message is memorable. What makes memorable? For me, it’s inspiring emotion, it’s about making someone, the reader, feel. The emotion you inspire is important and fairly obviously it wants to be a positive message. In order to draw out emotion, you may need to provoke, you may need to cite examples or tell a story. Being brutally honest, if your content doesn’t inspire emotion, it will get lost among the world of mediocre. Take your time, tap into the nerve centre of your audience; you’ve worked hard to gain their attention, you just need to do enough to be remembered too. Be daring, be bold, gain criticism and most importantly, gain an audience who are touched by your message.

4. Convenience

With the modern world being the way that it is, consumers want everything ‘on demand’. People have less and less patience, they want to be able to access information on their terms, in their time, at their convenience. Remember, this is not about you, it is not about what you are able to provide, it’s about your target audience, it’s about their routines, their convenience. If your audience wants film and you release hard backed books, take a guess at the outcome. If, however, you provide relevant, attractive and emotive content to your consumers convenience, you have a much greater chance of success. If your target audience prefers SMS once a week, that’s what you should deliver! Make it easy, deliver it in the way they want it and they expect it. Anything less and you may be wasting your efforts entirely. Do the very best you can!

5. Shareability

If you’ve managed to achieve the success of getting someone to read and digest your content, the supreme success comes in getting them to recommend it to others by sharing. Remember, people won’t joust share anything. Even recommending a holiday read can be challenging so recommending content that may make a professional difference to someone needs to be well founded. Assuming you’ve achieved the first 4 points, it may be as simple as having ‘share this’ buttons, you may need to ask for a referral. Whatever you need to do to get the referral, do it, there is nothing as successful in conversion as personal testimonials. Another thought to leave you with is the use of incentives to gain the referral. Be creative, stimulate desire and gain recommendations from your target audience. Achieve these and you’ll be we’ll on your way to a rewarding sales channel with high conversion ratios.

Finally, remember your call to action!

What do you want your recipients to do? Contact you? Share with a friend? Comment?
Make sure you tell them!

If you follow these simple steps for creating more successful content marketing you’re likely to stay a step ahead of your competition and convert more of those all important subscribers.

By Ryan Mullins