Content marketing is an essential ingredient for operating in the current digital landscape. Just about every business these days either has a content marketing strategy or knows it needs to develop one. The quality of content marketing strategies varies wildly across all industries, however, and there’s a lot of room for experimentation, expansion, and improvement.
The good news is, improving content marketing doesn’t have to be difficult.
Here are 3 tips for better content marketing to consider as your business or organization looks ahead at its next round of campaigns:
It’s All about the Story — and Making Your Audience the Star
Content marketing does best when it’s based in solid storytelling. Our brains are already wired to receive and process stories — why mess around with a great thing? I always recommend starting with a very simple and universally appealing story framework: the hero’s journey. Particularly, making your audience the hero and putting it on the journey. (I’ve even developed a free training that teaches this principle.)
Making your audience the star of the show is powerful stuff. The challenge is, most companies get this formula backwards, focusing on how great they and their products or services are vs how wonderful, lovable, amazing, etc. the audience they want to buy said products or services is. It’s okay to tell the company story using the hero’s journey framework, but to make it a consistent element of an ongoing content marketing strategy will cause people to perceive that company as full of itself and label it with the dreaded “all about me” syndrome.
Know What Story Your Audience Wants to Hear — Then Tell It to Them
When my kids were little, they loved being read to before bed each night. They had a large library of wonderful books, but there were a handful of top picks, the ones they wanted to hear again and again. When I tried to slip in something different from time to time, they would tolerate it, but only for so long before their chubby little hands were grabbing for the old familiar favorites.
Your audience is not that much different than this. It knows, likes, and trusts you for very specific reasons and has certain stories it wants and likes to hear over and over. Figuring this out and then delivering variations of these same stories to them in fresh, surprising ways is one approach to use in creating  better content marketing, and can lead to improved engagement metrics as well as repeat business.
Consider the Power of a Sequel
There’s a lot to learn from the entertainment industry when it comes to serving a hungry audience content it will eagerly consume. Hollywood is famous for shamelessly creating sequels to just about everything. Come to think of it, the publishing industry is also built on a sequel model (think Twilight and Harry Potter, for starters).
With the lines between business and entertainment getting more and more blurred with each passing year, the time is now to explore how your organization could create a sequel to one of your past successful content marketing campaigns. A winning content creation recipe is simply mixing the familiar with a little bit of something new. Just look at the wild success of the Star Wars franchise for evidence of how the same basic story gets retold in a slightly different way each time, yet draws huge box office numbers and keeps its insatiable audience satisfied just long enough so that they are always anticipating the next installment.
Using storytelling as a means of communicating your company’s message will only continue to gain ground the deeper we venture into the digital landscape. Make a commitment to telling your stories well and you won’t be disappointed in how your audience responds. But most importantly, the audience you’ve worked so hard to capture will want to stick around long after the credits have ended.
[convertpress id=”4750″ replacetheme=”false”]
