As everyone today is well aware, content is king. The right content can help you meet your marketing and business goals, like brand awareness, consumer engagement and, ultimately, conversions. Creating great content is no small undertaking and when it’s all said and done, your content needs to be shared.
Consumers are spending more and more time interacting with content, as evidenced by the rapid increase in digital media consumption. In fact, U.S. adults now spend over 8 hours per day on digital media. Since people are viewing and digesting so much content, making your content discoverable, valuable, and amplifiable is the key.
Get Your Content Out There
According to Hubspot, the top challenges marketers face with content marketing are finding ideas for new content and creating content that receives high levels of online engagement. To address these challenges, however, you need to be able to create great quality content for your brand.
Here are some inventive ideas on how to produce sharable content:
- Create engaging content: The first step in creating sharable content is to attract an audience to your content.
- Conduct audience research: Who is your audience, what are they are interested in, and how do they like to interact with content?
- Create different types of content: The top 4 formats marketers leverage in their content strategy include videos, blogs, images, and infographics.
- Share content in different formats: The top 3 owned media content distribution channels for B2B marketers include a personal website, blog, and email newsletter. But don’t discount social media and other outlets that make sense for your brand.
- Optimize your content: In order to reach and grow your audience, you need to make sure you are optimizing your content and ensuring the correct keywords are being used for SEO.
- Measure your content: It is important to know how people are engaging with your content via metrics you deem important, such as audience reach and engagement.
- Repurpose content: If you have a good deal of content already created, here are some ways you can update your content to attract more eyeballs.
- Add visuals
- Use keywords
- (Re)share on social media
- Insert backlinks
- Create interactive content
- Write an e-book
- Make a FAQ or resource page
- Launch a podcast
- Leverage user-generated content
- Recommend previous articles in new posts
- Create a series
- Invite guest posters/influencers into the conversation
- Rewrite and repost
Otherwise Engaged: Where’s Your Audience?
So you’ve made great content, but it’s just not getting traction… yet. There are a couple of scenarios that come into play when content isn’t getting shared. First, check the quality of your content; it might be lacking and not quality enough to share. Solicit outside opinions on your content from customers, industry networks, colleagues, and content metrics. Pay close attention to content that is being amplified in your networks.
Secondly, people share content that they connect with. Honing in on the emotional quality of your content is instrumental in getting your content shared. Create content that resonates with people so much that they think others will appreciate it too. Alexa suggests creating content that is:
- Emotional: Strikes a chord with audiences and makes them feel something.
- Tied to identity: Makes it easy for readers to feel connected and see themselves in the content.
- Trending: Related to hot topics and the latest fads.
- Valuable: Provides answers, solutions, and helpful advice.
Who’s Sharing What
Another scenario, and a highly undervalued tactic, is that your content is getting lost in the shuffle and isn’t discoverable. This requires answering the question of who is going to amplify this and why. Your current target audience may not be the ones who will ultimately share your content. You need to identify the people who are influential to your community and target them with your content. According to market and audience research company SparkToro, in order for your content to take off, you need the “added firepower of people and publications that can extend your visibility and reach.”
Here are a couple of suggestions on how to recruit amplifiers to share your content:
- Incentivize amplifiers with content that will amplify their goals. People are driven by incentives to earn engagement and they’re unlikely to amplify, reference or publish your content unless there’s an obvious connection to them.
- Stand out from the crowd by creating emotionally captivating and quality content that helps amplifiers stand out, too. Your content must resonate with both the amplifier and their audience.
The bottom line is that to achieve sharable content and brand amplification, you must create content that is thoughtfully crafted with quality and detailed information that will help entertain, educate and inspire both amplifiers as well as your potential customers. It’s important to create not just for one audience, but for both. Keep these tips in mind when creating your next content marketing campaign.
Image by Alexandra_Koch