The dreaded content marketing rut, we’ve all been there. Everyone from copywriter to CMO has experienced content marketing fatigue at one point or another. Sometimes it feels like no matter how hard you try you can’t quite seem to:
- Create enough content
- Get the engagement you need
- Find interesting ways to innovate
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Recent research has found that, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were a year ago and 54% find producing engaging content to be a challenge.
If only there were a list of tips that you could reference from time to time when you need a content marketing pick-me-up.
Well, look at what we have here! Keep this list of 25 content marketing tips handy for whenever the need strikes.
Want to Make Your Blog More Impactful?
- Stand for something specific – Being focused and opinionated attracts attention. It builds authority and credibility.
- Human recognition – Curate responses to opinions into content that recognizes contributors
- Know your audience – Understand how your blog readers prefer to discover, consume and act on content.
- Look beyond yourself for blog topics and writing – Connect with your community for inspiration – crowdsource topics through analysis of blog engagement.
- Review the content type and buying cycle – What is to be accomplished? Who is it for and where in the buying cycle does the focus need to be?
- Examine your objective – The individual pieces of content need to match the objective of the content marketing strategy as a whole.
- Make your audience feel something – Many resources specialize in photography that expresses specific emotions, but the image must mesh with the overall content message
Experiencing Writer’s Block?
- Draft first – If you’re having trouble creating an outline, do your draft first, then reverse engineer the outline.
- Be conversational – Write as if you’re having a conversation with an old friend. Write the way that you would talk, maybe even exaggerate the tone.
- Forget perfection – When you’re stuck trying to write perfection, turn off your inner editor and just write garbage. Try even typing with your eyes closed so that you’re not tempted to edit. Then look at it and edit and refine it until it’s worth showing.
- Find an ideal time – Everyone’s brain works in different ways. Find the time of day that works best for you to be creative with your copywriting and try to set aside a time slot each day to focus on writing.
Not Sure How to Repurpose Existing Content?
- Repurposing basics – Customize and deconstruct – Take an eBook and structure it to be industry specific so you can create different versions for distinctive industries.
- Make lists – Collect disparate resources relevant to your target audiences and rank them.
- Interview famous and soon to be famous, industry leaders – Create a library of quotes for social shares to a specific audience. Use tips and quotes to create an infographic.
- Capture live or recorded content aka “Live blogging” – Find events offline or online, live or recorded that contain content and influencers relevant to your target audience.
Struggling with Your Influencer Marketing Strategy?
- Defining influence – Take into account their ability and willingness to affect action – not just achievement of high fan, friend and follower counts.
- Don’t get distracted – Don’t be blinded by the prospect of fame by association. Popular influencers won’t necessarily create positive effects for brand marketing and PR goals..
- Validate influencers – Narrow down a short list of influencers by finding correlations across multiple influencer discovery tools and then validating through manual inspection of their work.
- Share a game plan – Provide examples of a thought leader who is already speaking to your target audience. Share steps for how you might attract, engage and partner with those influencers.
- Be the expert – Help your boss & constituents understand what influencer marketing is and isn’t.
- Be mindful of results – Focusing on social shares vs clickthroughs and actions creates fuzzy influencer results.
Need to Weave More Storytelling into Your Content?
- Develop and advance the narrative – Strong brand stories are told through anecdotes, strung together to advance the narrative.
- Customer-centric value – Use statistics & percentages. Try sharing customer feedback.directly.
- Address human needs – B2B content should elevate the product or service to address the human needs of the audience.
- Visualize the message – Convey emotion through visual stimulation, and use a variety of visual elements such as videos, infographics, memes, comics, SlideShares and quotes.
Hopefully this list provides you with some inspiration when you’re struggling to make your content marketing program shine. What have you found works best for you when you’re in a content marketing slump?
Header image via Shutterstock
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