Anyone who has ever heard the story of Scheherazade (pictured in our featured image) knows that storytelling can be a lifesaving skill. In the tale, Scheherazade was destined for beheading by a bored and vengeful King. A skilled storyteller, however, Scheherazade managed to keep herself alive for 1,001 nights by telling the King stories. At the end of 1,001 nights, the King decided to spare her life and realized, in the process, that he had actually fallen in love with her.
For content marketers, the tale of Scheherazade is more than just entertaining – it’s a framework for success. Storytelling is one of the best ways for companies today to set themselves apart from the competition. Additionally, it is a fantastic way to reinforce company values and add interest to your products, goods and services.
In today’s world of competitive content marketing, the only way to truly be heard is to tell a story that is better than everyone else’s.
What is Storytelling In Content Marketing?
For many communications professionals, storytelling may seem unrelated to business. With tools like traditional advertising and PPC ads under their belts, many marketers fail to see the value of storytelling, which is often regarded as a fanciful pastime.
Storytelling can be fairytales, yes, but it can also be the process of producing a human connection through great business writing. Whether you realize it or not, there is no successful product, business or site on the web today that doesn’t utilize storytelling in its content marketing. This is because storytelling is one of the most effective ways to spike customer interest and encourage increased interaction.
In order to purchase a product, a customer needs to feel a connection with that product. This only happens when they can see themselves using the product or when they fully understand what makes it special. This, in turn, only happens when the person creating the content for a given company is capable of telling a story that sucks customers in and keeps them interested.
A great story transcends traditional facts and figures and evokes a strong response from customers. Additionally, telling a great story helps to create “sticky” memories that remain with customers long after the story has ended.
Content marketing provides the ideal vessel for great storytelling and, when done correctly, it can easily help a company reinforce their values in the eyes of their customers. It can be difficult, however, for Type-A company mindsets to wrap their heads around the fact that something as seemingly “fluffy” as storytelling can actually help boost their business in large ways. Fortunately, we’re not making this up and the first step of telling a great story is simply finding out whether or not your story is worth telling in the first place.
The 4 Types of Stories Worth Telling
Whether or not you realize it, storytelling in content marketing is almost exactly like storytelling in novels or journalistic content. Stories, at their core, are archetypal and storytelling in content marketing is no different. The 4 types of stories that are worth telling in a content marketing setting are as follows:
1. The Origin Story
Where did your company come from? How was it born? Was there a colossal failure that leads to success? Telling your origin story helps customers find something to relate to within your company, which in turn helps them build loyalty. Customers love a shared mindset. Take Cory’s Cookies for example. With an origin story like that, how could you resist?
2. The Product Story
Why did you create the product? If you answer is “to make a bunch of money and add more consumer junk to the mainstream” you can bet you won’t be very successful. People want to know why your product is different and what inspired it. Canadian clothing manufacturer Lululemon tells their product story by including a “why we made this” segment in every product description on their website.
3. The Customer Story
How has your product affected the life of your customers? Why do they love it? What do they do with it? Potential customers look to existing customer reviews as a main source of information when making purchasing decisions, which means that by including the customer story in your marketing, you can help inspire confidence in your potential clients.
4. The “What I Stand for Story”
Think about Apple’s wildly successful “Think Different” campaigns. Why were they such a runaway landslide of success? Because the marketing department of that company is and has always been great at extolling the virtues of exactly what the company stands for: end-to-end integration, beautiful products, seamless software, art and technology combined into one package. As a result, Apple has an absolute cult following of people who want to stand for those things, too.
Five Tips for Great Storytelling
In terms of execution, storytelling for content marketing and storytelling for book writing diverge slightly. Since content marketing storytelling is designed to invoke a response from customers, it follows a different set of guidelines than novel-based storytelling does. Incorporate these 5 tips for great storytelling in your content:
1. Give the Story a Message: As is true with other sectors of marketing, it is important to know whom you’re writing to and what you want to convey. In order to create great story, begin by asking yourself about your target audience. Are they young or old? What do they care about? Where do they live? What are the values experiences and concerns that they are most likely to connect with? How much money do they make? These questions will help you hone your statements to get right to the heart of your audience. Additionally, it will help you devise a moral and construct a story your target audience will love.
2. Include Your Experiences: We’ve all heard the saying “Write what you know” and storytelling in content marketing is no difference. In order to tell a great story, you need to mine your life experiences in order to pull the best example to illustrate your own message. People love vulnerability and by exposing your own hardships and truths, you make it easier for them to relate. Share a moment that your own poor decisions lead to ultimate success or how a failure translated into an important learning period. These things provide an important entry point to a great story and can go a long way toward making your content relatable and powerful.
3. Don’t be the Star: There is a difference between storytelling and ego and it’s possible to be helpful without being obnoxious. It’s a fine line, though, and the most important thing to remember in writing great stories is to avoid making yourself the star of the story. It’s fine to talk about your experiences, as mentioned in point #2, but you’ll want to avoid talking too much about yourself. Audiences don’t want to witness your ego, so keep your storytelling instructional, valuable and helpful without caving too much to self-congratulation.
4. Identify the Struggle: People are more likely to relate to your content if they feel like they can actually relate to your content. This means that you need to get inside of their heads and prove that you understand their struggle. In order to do that, place yourself in your reader’s shoes. What are they concerned about? What are their problems or fears? What is the conflict that drives them to change? Once you’ve established that, take some time to consider how you can cater to that and then tailor your stories to being your customer’s main partner in crime and including them in the journey to overcome the struggle.
5. Stay Simple: Content marketing is not the same thing as writing a novel and, as such, it’s a bit inappropriate to have 15 volumes meant to cover a single epic story. That said, it’s important to keep it simple. Less is more when it comes to storytelling in content marketing and a moving and compelling story doesn’t have to be an involved and drawn-out affair. Instead, write from the heart and prove to your audience that you can provide interesting, detailed content. This will help solidify your message and improve all facets of your marketing.
6. Practice: Storytelling takes time and not everyone can come out of the gate with a prize-winning tale. If you think you’ve got an important story to tell, practice with your friends and colleagues before you take it to your customers. This will give you a chance to perfect the art and hone the details before it truly matters. Great stories will easily go viral through word of mouth and shares, so it’s important to get it right before you get it out there. The return on a great story can be huge; so don’t be afraid to invest some time to perfecting the art before you present it to your customers.
Is Your Story Worth Telling?
Nowadays, customers are flooded with stories. Every television commercial, radio ad, piece of content and glossy magazine page seeks to tell a story. With that in mind, the key to great storytelling is simply to ask yourself if each piece of the story is useful and valuable.
When incorporating storytelling into your content marketing, it’s helpful to think of it as an introduction. When you meet a new person, you want to know where that person is from, what they do, what they love and what’s important to them. Determining which stories are worth telling in content marketing is no different. By telling your origin story, product story, customer story and “what I stand for” story, you can introduce your company to customers in a well-rounded and holistic way. This allows you to reach your audiences from a place of genuine interest and to touch their lives from a place of skill, excitement and helpfulness.
Remember, creative writers can sometimes be your best asset for increasing your storytelling power. We have some fantastic creative writers in our team – check out our creative writing!
It’s that time again: social media and all the changes!
Twitter is up to something again, and no one is entirely sure if this change will be detrimental or just something we can all easily shrug off. It has to do with share counts.
It goes along with a lot of the recent changes within the social media world, which means that the channel is moving away from third-party posting sites getting relevant data.
Is this something you need to be worried about? Maybe a little, but things are still too new to know for sure.
What is this change? What can you expect? And can you even begin to prepare for it now?
I am going to delve into this latest story and give you all the info we have at the moment.
What’s Twitter Up To Now With Share Counts?
Did you quake in your boots when I mentioned Twitter is making a change? Don’t worry; most marketers felt the same way when we heard the news. Social Warfare revealed in their newsletter that the end is near for share counts.
Twitter is going to make a change with their share and follow buttons that keeps data from third-party posting sites. These are sites like Hootsuite, Buffer, and anything else you use to schedule on the channel.
However, they aren’t being stingy with the data; they’re simply removing the share numbers that appear next to the buttons.
This is going to go into effect in October, and people are wondering just what this means for their blogs.
The biggest thing is that your blog button is no longer going to show the counts of how many times it has been shared.
When this new change goes into action, it will no longer show that number, meaning no one will know just how often it has been shared.
This is really bothering a lot of marketers and for good reason. Let’s say you spent a lot of time on a blog and it went viral. I’m talking 15K shares and you’re beyond excited about it.
With the new change, no one will know that your particular viral blog got shared so much; it’ll look just like your other blogs. This means, no share numbers whatsoever.
This could be good on one hand, but possibly irksome or even bad on the other. October will show us for sure which one it will be.
What We Know About the Change Right Now
Unfortunately, we don’t know much about this new change because Twitter hasn’t given us a more in depth look into it. We just know the basics and that no Twitter counts are going to be shown to readers and users.
This is also going to impact the follower counts that are shown for the same reason – the number simply won’t be shown.
Image Credit: Twitter.com
However, companies are noticing that where the biggest impact will be is with smaller publishers instead of larger sites like Mashable.
This could be potentially bad for smaller publishers, but we don’t know just how large the impact will be.
Should You Run Away Screaming?
No! Don’t run away – Twitter is still an important part of your social media strategy. You should still be focusing on using Twitter to the fullest potential, getting the most out of your Twitter content.
While waiting is rough work, especially when you’re waiting for a possibly huge change on a social channel, that’s just what you should do right now.
Before you start to panic and rethink your use of Twitter, wait to see just what this will mean for your business. And don’t forget to focus on still reaching out to your current audience and working to grow it.
How Can You Prep for This Possible Change?
It is hard to say just what you can do to prepare for this change until we know more details, but I fully plan on keeping you informed.
If you feel this change will be bad, let your voice be heard. Several businesses are already prepping for this, and some have even started the hashtag: #SaveOurShareCounts.
Make your voice heard before October hits!
As we wait, don’t fret about sharing your content – keep working with it and encouraging clients to share, tweet, and re-tweet. Just because we may no longer have those share counts doesn’t mean people won’t be reading.
Keep writing and creating for your clients no matter what.
Keep On Tweeting, Keep On Tweeting
Take a page out of Dory’s book and just keep swimming, or rather, tweeting. You can also keep an eye out here at Express Writers to see the latest news on the Twitter share counts front.
What say you? Do you think this change is terrifying and potentially bad? Or that it might not be something to get too worked up over?
If you’re not familiar with Periscope, it’s time to learn all about it.
Owned by Twitter, Periscope is a video app that allows users to take real-time video and post it to a variety of social media outlets.
After originally gaining popularity with a host of diverse companies, Periscope has quickly been hailed as one of the most exciting and effective ways for a company to extend its message and promote a brand.
What is Periscope?
Periscope is a live-streaming video app that allows people to stream video directly from their phones to anyone who is interested enough to watch. (Note: it’s only available as the app, not on a site currently.)
Much like Snapchat except without the annoying immediate delete feature, Periscope is a broadcast platform that allows everyone to become an instant videographer.
Twitter purchased the app earlier in the year for a grand total of $100 million dollars and, so far, it’s performing well.
Within Periscope, users take videos, stream them out to the world and viewers can “like” and comment on the videos. It all happens real-time. These updates appear as a live-feed on the video screen for the original user to read and interact with.
So, basically I can turn my camera on and immediately broadcast, and real-time comments, “hearts” and member names pop up as people join and interact with me.
You can “follow” people here, and people can follow you. You’ll even be notified of live shows to watch if your friends say you should watch (it’s an annoying whistle on my phone that I need to turn off, ha).
There’s even a map showing how many people are live on Periscope around the globe, like so:
Photo credit bloggersociety.com
I’ve been pretty successful at watching and joining a few Periscopes, and soon I plan to host my own Periscope, answering questions about writing. (Feel free to get in touch if you have some you want me to answer before the show!)
I have to say, it’s pretty fun to be on. You can join anyone’s live feed – and anyone can join yours. You can even share after to your Facebook or Twitter and anyone can watch the reply.
How much better can instant video get?
Some even say it’s more refined and useful than its close cousin, Meerkat.
Periscope is a great way for content marketers to effectively promote their company while also making a unique and accessible impression on their audience.
4 Big Brands Using Periscope
Although Periscope is new to the game of live video streaming, it’s already garnered a wide variety of followers. Companies have chosen to use the app thanks to its cool features: unlike some of its competitors, Periscope allows users to view archives of video streams, which means that viewers can locate live-stream videos even after the broadcast period has ended. Additionally, the app offers a curated and featured section that displays videos the Periscope team loves as well as the videos that people a user follows have recently interacted with. Because of these features, Periscope has become popular with these companies:
1. Spotify
Spotify joined the Periscope community in late March and immediately got down to business by posting a behind-the-scenes video of a performance by popular Irish singer Conor O’Brien, a member of the band The Villagers. The video garnered 382 views during its live-stream period and gained 1,534 likes during that same time.
2. Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew hopped on the Periscope bandwagon almost immediately after the app was released, choosing to release a vine-style video called “stop by to say what’s up.” In the video, a girl spells the word “Swag” on a chalkboard in front of a table full of the company’s logo-branded shirts and hats.
3. Red Bull
Red Bull is known for being one of the first companies to hop aboard new social media platforms and they didn’t miss a beat when it came to Periscope. The energy drink company streamed its live events from the Red Bull Guest House at Miami Music Week earlier in the year using the app and supplemented its use of Periscope with updates on Twitter and Snapchat.
4. DKNY
Known for more than just edgy clothing, this lifestyle brand has begun using live-streaming video as a way to offer customers behind-the-scenes views of the company’s shoots and clothing selection. Specifically, DNKY used Periscope earlier in the year to provide customers and fans with a look inside the company’s closets. This created a frenzy of anticipation among eager customers and was, by all accounts, a very good marketing move.
10 Ways to Use Periscope to Do More Business
Most companies are familiar with the ways in which content marketing can be beneficial to businesses, but many people associate content marketing with written content in the form of blogs, articles, how-to’s and answered questions. Content marketing extends to video and visual content, however, and Periscope is a promising tool for any company that wants to promote its brand and reach more customers. Here are the top 10 ways companies can use periscope for business purposes:
1. Use Periscope to Make the Brand Relatable
Customers love to feel like they can relate to a given brand. Often, companies can come off as somewhat cold, omnipotent forces without a human face or a personality. Periscope and other live-streaming video services can help change that. Take the Spotify example from above: Spotify is a company that specializes in live-streamed music and thus works closely with musicians. The average Spotify listener, however, doesn’t see that. All the user sees is a list of saved songs and various playlists. By live-streaming their studio session with Conor O’Brien, however, Spotify added a human face and a sense of relateability to an otherwise impenetrable company and, most importantly, allowed viewers to take a peak at what really goes on in the Spotify offices.
2. Use Periscope to Offer Behind-the-Scenes Peeks
Much like making a brand relatable serves to produce a stronger brand identification in customers, giving customers sneak peeks of behind-the-scenes action helps make them feel like insiders. It’s a widely known fact that customers love to feel like they have insider intelligence and offering behind-the-scenes videos is one of the best ways to promote interest in your company.
3. Use Periscope to Offer Pre-Release Demos
Periscope will be a powerful tool for companies to offer demos of soon-to-be-released products. Although a snazzy photo and a “coming soon” description on a company’s website are great, they’re often not enough to get customers truly excited about a product. For example, PrecisionHawk, a data collection company, used Periscope to provide a flight demo preview of its new drone collection as well as live-streaming impromptu interviews with some of the flight-demo attendees. Doing this builds anticipation and encourages customer interaction with the eventual launch of the product.
4. Use Periscope for Tutorials and Help Desk Purposes
Nothing kills a company/customer interaction quite so quickly as a difficult-to-navigate product and poor customer service. Thanks to Periscope and other live-streaming apps, however, this can soon be a thing of the past. By translating customer concerns into live-streamed tutorials and how-to episodes, companies can offer stellar customer service while also humanizing their company and creating outstanding customer loyalty.
5. Use Periscope to Present Ideas
Much like a pre-release demo, Periscope can be used to introduce new ideas to customers. When a company doesn’t have a physical product produced yet (or is dealing with ideas rather than products), it’s nearly impossible to write something up on a website that will incite customer interest. With Periscope, however, companies can introduce new offerings without having a physical product in hand.
6. Use Periscope to Broadcast Live Q&A
Customers love companies that offer surprise value and Periscope is a great platform for introducing exciting guests and dispensing short, vivid, exciting Q&A sessions to the customer base. Alternately, companies can use Periscope to answer customer questions in a live Q&A session, as Tim Ferris often does through various video methods.
7. Use Periscope for Live Events
When customers are dedicated to a company, they want to be present for live events. If they can’t be, Periscope offers the second-best option: an exciting live broadcast of live events. Because Periscope offers a unique perspective on a highly accessible platform, companies that broadcast their live events in this fashion are likely to draw more customers and increase excitement.
8. Use Periscope for Viewer Feedback
Wondering about what your customers want from a product? Use Periscope to ask them. Because Periscope is an interactive platform, it is a great way for companies to interact in real-time with their customers. Customers can provide feedback, offer comments and interact with a company’s proposition using Periscope much easier than they can on less flexible platforms.
9. Use Periscope to Offer Webinars
Webinars are a close cousin to the Q&A. Ideal for boosting engagement and broadcasting low-tech, simple sessions with interesting guests, webinars are a great way to engage customers and promote further interaction with the brand.
10. Use Periscopes to Spread the Word About Exclusive Offers
Want to produce a literal rush of business for your company? Use Periscope to announce an exclusive offer to the customers who are watching the live-broadcast. Again, people love to feel like they have insider knowledge and using Periscope to release secret deals and promote limited-time-purchase offers is an incredibly effective way to produce new business and get people excited about your products.
For companies that want to interact with their customers in a relatable yet exciting new way, Periscope offers the ideal platform. Great for companies who want to remove barriers and interact with their customers in a more organic fashion, Periscope offers a huge amount of content options in the tiny package of a single app.
Whether you’re seeking to promote a new product or share the fun of a live event with your absent customers, Periscope is the tool of the future that will help your business get it all done.
Are you a business marketer new to content marketing?
If so, you probably already know that your best audience is found online, and now you’re trying to find out the best ways to attract them.
Content marketing is where it’s at today. Gone are the days of traditional advertising and outbound marketing. Paying for click ads is no longer a good idea either, the market is too thin and lean in PPC nowadays: you’ll likely overpay for a click and drive a great deal of traffic that ultimately doesn’t matter for your site. So what’s the solution? The answer is simple: content marketing.
In order to stand out in the field of content marketing, however, it’s important to develop an “expert voice.”
What is an expert voice, you ask?
It’s the tone and style of writing that comes from having a deep knowledge of the field and being very aware of what’s going on in your niche. It means staying on top of niche-related current events, technological shifts and important trends in your market.
Because today’s content marketing environment is so filled with great writers, being an expert voice is the only way to stand out. Not to worry, though, it’s easier than you think.
Let’s Define Good Content Marketing
According to Joe Pulizzi at Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is the “strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience.” Content marketing is called by many the “marketing tactic of the future” due to the fact that it’s significantly less obtrusive and more efficient than outbound marketing, which relies on tactics like cold calling, email blasting and traditional advertising to gain customers.
Content marketing, on the other hand, relies on creating useful, educational, helpful content that assists would-be customers in learning new things and solving problems. The theory behind content marketing is that customers appreciate great content and, if a company can establish itself as an authority in the field by creating helpful, useful, high-quality content, that company will be rewarded by more business and loyal customers.
What’s more, it seems to be working: 57% of businesses have acquired customers through their company blog and 42% have gained readers through Twitter. This just goes to show that, in addition to being a more evolved way to market, content marketing is also a very effective way to market.
What’s so Great About Content Marketing?
Traditional forms of marketing, like advertising and direct mail, are becoming less and less effective. It’s been obvious for a long time that people don’t like aggressive advertising and, when you take into account that 84% of 25-34 year olds have left a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad”, it becomes clear just how ineffective outbound marketing is. The reason for that is simple: outbound marketing seeks to push things on customers while content marketing seeks only to provide value. That said, outbound marketing casts a broad net while content marketing simply means creating great content and attracting already-interested customers through web searches, search engine optimization (SEO) and word-of-mouth.
How Can I Start?
Although content marketing may seem involved and difficult, it’s relatively easy to break into the field and begin creating your own killer content. I’m saying this because I was able to get into it, leave a med school career, and teach myself content writing—then start a writing agency where 95% of our marketing is through content!
So, here are my top 25 tips to help you get started in content marketing:
1) Define Your Goals
If you’re new to content marketing, the first thing you need to do is clearly define your content marketing goals. Are you seeking to build brand awareness? Gain email subscribers? Increase conversions? Increase purchases across the board?
Regardless of what you’re setting out to do, you need to know where you’re going in order to ultimately get there. As you get started in content marketing, ask yourself if the content you’re creating will help support your defined goals. If it won’t, focus your energies on content that will.
2) Start a Blog—Now (And Stay On It)
If you’ve already got a website, link it to a blog that will feature a great deal of your company’s content. Blogs provide 126% more leads for small businesses than pages without one so it’s well worth your time.
3) Define Your Metrics
In content marketing, it’s important to be able to track the performance of your content. That said, you’ll need to establish some metrics to track things like the traffic your content garners, who is referring followers to your site, how long people are spending on your site and how many pages they’re visiting, what your bounce rate is and how many social shares your content is gaining. Implementing a set of metrics helps you better target your content and cater to customer wishes.
4) Calculate Resources
Resources, in this context, mean more than just money. Do you have several great writers in your company? Would it behoove you to hire a content marketing agency? Who will be responsible for each piece of the content marketing burden? Deciding these things now helps you have a clear plan going forward.
5) Write a Mission Statement
Every good company should have a mission statement. Like a road map, a mission statement defines where you are, where you’re going and why you’re going there. Each mission statement should answer one of these 4 questions:
What do you do?
How do you do it?
Who does it benefit?
Why is it valuable?
Although a mission statement may seem unrelated to content marketing, writing one can help you clarify your direction and become an expert voice on the web.
6) Develop a Target Persona
A target persona is incredibly important when it comes to knowing whom you’re marketing to. It’s tough to create great content without having a specific customer in mind and creating a target persona is a helpful way to understand exactly whom you’re talking to.
7) Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
Like a mission statement, a great content marketing strategy helps your company define what it cares about. For example, popular lifestyle clothing brand Anthropologie publishes regular, seasonal DIY cocktail recipes on the company’s blog. While it may seem at first like this is in no way related to clothing or home wares, these drink recipe mimic the feel of Anthropologie’s company as a whole: each drink is made with unique, high-class ingredients that appeal to Anthropologie’s customer base.
That said; a content marketing strategy doesn’t always follow a straight line. Rather, it’s the process of determining what your customers value and how you can provide parallel content that they will find valuable, interesting and unique and that is not a direct pitch for sales.
8) Define Your Niche
What makes your content special and how will it help people? Are you going to write how-to articles? Develop infographics? Record podcasts? There are many types of content in content marketing and it doesn’t matter which few you choose to focus on as long as you’re bringing a unique twist to your content.
9) Audit your Content
If you currently run a company, there’s a good chance you’ve already got some content on your site. Marketing materials, product descriptions, pre-existing blog posts all count. If you have content lying around, audit it to identify weak points and decide what, if anything, you can repurpose.
10) Start Social Media Accounts
Social media accounts are important in content marketing and, if nothing else, you’ll want to establish a presence on The Big 4: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
11) Compile a List of Ideas
Developing a list of content creation ideas based on knowledge, customer inquiry and market demands is a wise step that will keep you from scrambling for ideas down the road. Write about what your company is good at, for starters. An outdoor clothing company may write about the top 10 rock climbing adventures, for example. Write about what your customers are curious about based upon comments and inquiries on question sites like Quora and build upon old content. Consider starting a series or reviving old content for new use.
12) Start a Content Calendar
Developing a content calendar helps you stay onto of your content publishing activity and ensures that posts are published regularly and on-time. It also helps you keep track of what you’ve written and where there may be gaps in your topic coverage.
13) Make it Diverse
In terms of working with content, it’s important to mix your content up. Don’t rely entirely on blog posts or social media or podcasts. Instead, cultivate a mixture of everything. Your audiences will appreciate it and your content will be more interesting.
14) Decide on Distribution Channels
In order to decide how best to distribute your content, you need to determine where most of your audience comes from. Social media? Search engines? Create content for those sources first and foremost.
15) Determine Goals for Each Channel
If you’re distributing content on Facebook, for example, you might be seeking shares whereas if you distribute content on Twitter, you may be after favorites or re-tweets. Once you’ve decided how you’re going to distribute your content, it’s important to develop goals for each unique channel. This helps you gauge success and better cater to each channel’s unique distribution method.
16) Learn About SEO
This is an important step. SEO is huge in content marketing and, while you do want to create content for people, you also need to optimize your content so that search engines can find it. Optimize everything for SEO and you’ll be well on your way to drawing customers and creating more engagement.
17) Hire a Content Creation Manager
Content creation is a lot of work and, if you have the budget, it’s worth it to hire someone to oversee the process. A content manager can develop, prioritize and edit content as well as helping your company repurpose old content and schedule new pieces.
18) Do Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research is an important piece of creating great content. By knowing which keywords you’re targeting, you can create more specific content that better caters to your audience and is easier for search engines to discover and rank.
19) Create a Top 10 List of Your Own content
This can help readers discover even more of your content and is a great way to link back to old posts. Additionally, it increases reader understanding and makes your site more easily navigable.
20) Start Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to build authority and establish dominance in your niche. See this easy tutorial for more info on how to start guest blogging.
21) Build Your Community
Actions like commenting on other blogs, answering questions on Quora, guest blogging and sharing other guest posts are a great way to build a blogging community, which aids in your content marketing goals and helps you spread the word about your product, good or service via referral and mentions.
22) Listen to Your Audience
Once you’ve begun creating content, you’ll also begin to get audience feedback. This can help you determine what they like, what they don’t and what they want more of. By listening to everything your audience has to say, you can create content that they love and find valuable.
23) Produce Quality Work
Although this may seem excessively simple, it’s an important piece. When it comes to content marketing, it’s always quality over quantity. Never publish sloppy posts because you’re pressed for time. This will only diminish your authority and harm your reputation.
24) Consistently Assess Value
Remember that the #1 thing that sets content marketing apart from other types of marketing is that content marketing provides value to customers. While writing and distributing your content, ask yourself all the time if it provides value. If it doesn’t, go another way.
25) Incorporate Storytelling
By incorporating storytelling into your content marketing, you provide a better experience for readers and help draw people in to your content. The importance of storytelling is applicable to all forms of content – not just writing. Podcasts, infographics, video posts and visual content should all include great storytelling.
Conclusion: Welcome!
If you’re just getting started in content marketing, we want to welcome you. It’s an exciting world and my initial tips can help you get your feet wet and start your content marketing career on the right path.
If you’ve ever heard of popular worldwide accommodations broker Airbnb, it’s likely that you’re familiar with the company’s beautiful, sleek marketing materials.
Did you know, however, that Airbnb is currently standing out as one of the top content leaders in the industry?
In addition to writing a beautiful, image-dense blog, Airbnb also wows audiences with their commercials and involvement in today’s big, global issues.
Read on to learn more.
The 6 Pillars of Quality Content That Airbnb Relies On
In today’s content-saturated world, a company doesn’t stand a chance if it can’t produce content that stands out and provides real value to audiences. Although there are dozens of schools of thought on how to “win at content marketing“, it’s generally accepted that great content possesses the following 6 traits (each of which Airbnb incorporates into their marketing strategy, although we’ll talk about this in a moment):
1. Great Content is Engaging
Nobody is going to sit through an ad or read a blog post if it’s boring and uninspired. For this reason, great content also needs to be engaging content. Although it goes without saying that not every post needs to answer life’s persistent questions or delve into the biggest challenges the human species is currently facing, great content should, at the very least, be funny and interesting – both of which are traits that will promote more audience engagement and ensure that your customers don’t forget you as soon as the article or commercial ends.
2. Great Content is Valuable
Nobody wants to read or watch or otherwise engage with content that is surface-level and shallow. Because of this, content that is bound for success needs to be valuable to its readers. In order to provide value, great content should discuss things your readers find interesting or should help answer their questions and solve their problems. In order to create this content, marketers need to think about what matters to their customers and how, exactly, content can cater to that. In addition to being interesting right now, content like this is also typically evergreen, which means it will be valuable into the foreseeable future, as well.
3. Great Content Creates a Community
People got sick of hard-sell, product-focused content a very long time ago and, today, consumers want content that is valuable and engaging but that also caters to their unique belief systems and helps them feel like they are a part of a community. This is an incredibly deep marketing tactic that involves creating a company point of viewand considering client values and concerns as gleaned by research, surveys and analytics data. Essentially, however, it boils down to one simple concept: great content should make your customers feel like they’re a part of something. Or, better yet, it should make them feel like you’re leading something they want to be a part of.
4. Great Content Builds Authority
When it comes to great content, building authority doesn’t always mean flexing your intellectual muscles in order to make your competition cower and run (although it can certainly serve this purpose). Instead, building authority through great content means providing your readers with things that promote your brand as being well rounded, aware and intelligent. You should also seem like you know quite a bit about your specialty. For example, if you ran a company that produced cooking products, you would write content about everything from the best food destinations in Italy to the pros and cons of copper skillets. Authoritative content doesn’t mean narrowing yourself down to focus on only one aspect of your specialty but rather opening up and encompassing specific and related topics in an intelligent and thought-provoking way.
5. Great Content is Passionate
If you don’t care about what you’re writing about, you can bet that your readers won’t care about it either. Because of this, memorable content needs to be passionate. One of the best ways to create great content is to develop and display a genuine interest for the topic – this helps you get to the heart of the matter and makes your content more engaging and valuable for readers.
6. Great Content Strengthens Bonds
When you write great content, you produce bonds. You produce bonds between your customers and your brand as well as between your customers as individuals. The catch here, however, is that in order to be worthy of promoting bonds, content needs to address your subject in a real and compelling way. Nobody bonds with Geico’s “It’s What You Do” commercials quite so well as they do Subaru’s “Dream Weekend” commercial and this is specifically because one is more successful at promoting bonds than the other. We will see an example of how Airbnb does this in just a moment.
How Airbnb Consistently Creates Great Content
When you take into account that Airbnb is a global accommodations company, it’s obvious that the company needs to fully embrace the 6 pillars of great content in order to appeal to customers around the world (the company has an estimated 6 million users).
Not to fear, though, because Airbnb does this in spades. Let’s look at how.
3 Ways Airbnb is Delivering Great Content
1. The Power of Airbnb’s Blog
When you go to Airbnb’s blog, you’re immediately confronted by a truly beautiful interface.
Blog posts cover topics like “Airbnb’s Positive Impact in Chicago”, “Navigating Seasonal Demand: A Q&A” and “Living Amongst Legends: A Night at Fenway Park.”
At once, these topics embrace every single one of the 6 pillars of great content. They are beautiful, useful, engaging, passionate and dedicated to promoting and educating the entire Airbnb community of renters and rentees.
2. Airbnb’s Dedication to Human Issues
Recently, Airbnb made a big, bold move that won it favor with a huge host of customers. In advance of Caitlyn Jenner’s much-anticipated ESPY award speech, Airbnb took to its Twitter account to release a statement about its new commercial, which also premiered that night. The tweet read as follows:
“It takes courage to make a difference in the world, It also takes kindness. Tonight we honor both.”
What followed was a truly moving commercial that’s come to be known as Transkind. The response was overwhelming, and the company became known for it’s stance here.
3. Airbnb’s “Never a Stranger” Campaign
In the name of creating community, Airbnb has created a whole line of commercials called “Never a Stranger.” These commercials underscore the company’ s primary goal: to produce worldwide connections for people who utilize the service. These ads are effective because they, like everything Airbnb does, are beautiful, but also because they promote a sense of wonder, excitement and awe, all of which are things Airbnb’s customers care about and identify with.
The Verdict: Airbnb Provides a Great Example for Content Marketers Everywhere
When you look at the evidence we’ve cited in this article, it’s obvious that Airbnb is getting it right across the board.
In addition to creating beautiful, unique and inspiring content, Airbnb knows its customers so well that it is capable of reaching out to them exactly where they are and taking big stands that it knows they will identify with.
Because of this, Airbnb has become a huge company and much-loved company (it was named “Company of the Year” in 2014 by Inc.com) with positive economic impacts in cities around the globe. It’s clear that Airbnb is truly winning at their content game.
