A good content strategy can drive 100% of your revenue.
Content marketing fills the gap between what message brands want to share and what consumers actually want to see. That’s the secret to building active, engaged communities full of loyal brand advocates.
When you share relevant, targeted and compelling content, you give your target audience a chance to learn about your products and services and get familiar with your brand.
So that when your audience does need your service, you are top of mind.
But in a world of saturated social feeds and as the creator economy explodes, delivering quality content is key to getting ahead.
This blog will cover 5 tips for creating high-performing content that puts you in the best position to see tangible business results.
Hook your consumer
A hook triggers curiosity so that your audience doesn’t feel obliged to consume your content. Instead, they feel personally compelled to. Lure your customers in with something snappy, enticing and that evokes immediate interest.
Your job is to get them to bite.
Once you have their attention, your audience will become much more receptive to your messaging. But one hook alone at the start of your blog, video, or post isn’t enough.
The average human attention span is 8 seconds. So aim to constantly hit your consumer with bold statements or visuals littered strategically throughout your content.
Don’t just steal their attention. Retain it.
Good hooks make the value clear and easy to find. They tease the audience with rewards. They show new possibilities that solve problems through simple and specific solutions e.g. ‘get 25,000 subscribers without spending a penny’, ‘how we gained 16,641 followers in 7 days’, ‘double your email rates with this one hack’
If you want content that converts, include hooks that promise and then deliver value.
Write compelling copy
“Writing is not like painting where you add. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible” – Elie Wiesel
With shortening attention spans and saturated content spaces, mastering the art of saying more with fewer words is a huge skill. It’s the difference between clunky, convoluted and confusing messaging and impactful copy that cuts straight through the noise.
Less waffle means less opportunity for your reader to be distracted.
When you add copy to a social post, write a blog or send a newsletter, remember that having a single message per content piece is key. Otherwise, it can be overwhelming for the reader to digest and actually take away from your content, what you intend them to.
The trick is to keep things simple enough for your reader to understand, but compelling and contextualised enough for them to take action.
Use statistics and facts to add credibility to your brand. Leverage high-arousal emotions to keep your audience connected to the story that you’re telling. Tailor your language, content pillars and delivery towards your specific audience so it feels personally written to them.
Aim for more clarity, more precision and more impact.
Tell impactful stories
Yes, your aim is to ultimately convert your audience and monetize their interaction with your brand. But to do that, you need to view your consumers as people, not a market.
Humans act on feeling and emotion. It’s the classic ‘show don’t tell’ argument. When you allow people to make a decision for themselves (with some subconscious directing of course) they’re much more likely to invest in your brand.
Storytelling is one way to do this.
When you wrap your message in a story packed with high-arousal emotions, you transport people to where you want them to be, you make marketing feel less like marketing and most importantly, you provoke emotional responses.
Focus on high-arousal emotions, the ones that cause a physical reaction from the body. Instead of making somebody smile, make them howl with laughter. Instead of making them feel thrilled, give them goosebumps.
High arousal emotions go beyond surface-level emotions.
It’s how you create experiences around your brand that trigger visceral attachment to your stories. The more high-intensity emotions you evoke, the more likely consumers are to become invested in your content and act on your messaging.
If people love a brand story, 55% are more likely to buy the product in the future, 44% will share the story, and 15% will buy the product immediately.
Experiment more
‘Growth hacks’ is a term thrown around way too often. The reality is, what works for one person, business or brand won’t work for everyone. Results are contextual.
Timing. Industry. Audience. Channel. Demand.
All these variables change and so there’s no guarantee that a ‘hack’ that worked for somebody else’s content will deliver the same impact for you. It’s why you should always be experimenting with your ideas and testing different approaches.
If your typical content consists of long-form blog posts, why not try packaging it into bitesize videos and sharing across socials? (87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website. 80% of video marketers also claim that video has directly increased sales).
Try sharing content on different channels. Test engagement through different media types e.g. lives, polls, infographics, etc. You should never say no to something without testing first.
You can always learn from the stuff you create (and those learnings will be contextual to your audience, your business and your brand). Optimise your content as you discover what works well and what doesn’t.
Growth experiments > Growth hacks
Create for your customer
If you want to deliver content that converts, get to the nitty-gritty of what your customers want to see. Interview them, send surveys for feedback and analyse your data. Equally, look at why your audience is not buying from you…
Ask your sales team this: what is the biggest customer objection you face when selling?
Once you identify why customers aren’t converting, you can hone in your marketing efforts to strategically counteract or bring solutions to their objections. Create content that is designed to eliminate reasons customers might have not to invest in your brand, products or services.
Get them on your side.
The trick to this is properly understanding your customer before you try and sell to them. Spray and pray content with no coherent messaging or relevance to your target audience will just add to the noise on their social feeds.
Create targeted benefits-driven content and share and distribute it at relevant times to show that you genuinely care about your customer, not just their money.
That’s the secret to building trust and converting customers into fans.
Following these tips will ensure that every piece of content you deliver is intentional, audience-specific and engaging enough to warrant action.
Just churning out tired, dull and generic content can actually harm your brand. Bad content is a liability to your reputation and brand credibility.
Invest in your content and your audience will invest in you.
