The Content Marketing Challenge is Always the Same
- Getting heard
- Getting remembered
- Getting results
- Focus – design a strong message
- Variety – make routine information come alive
- Presence: convey confidence and command attention
“No one is buying chocolate chip ice cream anymore,” a Mental Floss Magazine article points out. Thanks to a buffet of options and flavors, chocolate chip is now being perceived as passe and boring. What’s more, due to health concerns, overall consumption of ice cream has dipped in recent years, the authors lament.
Ice cream is hardly the only area in which what was once the rage is now hardly remembered. Ponchos? selfie sticks? Hoverboards? (Who’d be caught dead?) Some things, of course, were made obsolete by technology (think paper maps, pagers, overhead projectors, typewriters, and telephone books).
Staying on top of trends becomes a crucial element in content marketing.
“The information you put on your website reflects your business, so ensuring you strike the right tone and include the necessary information is critical, IntuitMailChimp cautions. E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) have risen to the top of copywriting trends, Lauren Jefferson writes in Focus Copy.
“As consumers increasingly seek alignment between their purchases and personal values…brand ethics will become essential,” Vericast.com adds. “Instead of relying on broad demographic information, new technologies allow brands to create highly tailored campaigns to resonate with specific consumer groups.”
Despite all the trends that have come and gone, as content writers, we’ve learned at Say It For You,we can take courage from the fashion industry. There a sense of nostalgia has been awakened, with trends from the 70s and 80s making a comeback over the past decade. Tailored jackets and cinched waists are fashion staples that have made a comeback.
Reminding content writers that there is no lack of resources available to our readers, I recommend going beyond presenting facts, statistics, features and benefits. By sharing some “chocolate chip ice cream” nostalgia, we have a better chance of engaging our readers.
(Don’t you love it when someone confirms the correctness of a process you’ve always thought was right? ) “Quality content can get your web pages ranking higher in Google search results. But contextual links can help, too,” Aaron Anderson asserted in a May Content Marketing Institute piece.
Contextual links appear in the body of the text (just as shown in the paragraph above), citing the source of a claim or statistic, providing readers with the opportunity to get more in-depth information on the subject you’re discussing. “After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful,” Google says. “To do this, they identify signals that can help determine…..expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”.
With a contextual link-building strategy, Anderson adds, you encourage other sites to use your valuable content to provide their readers with additional information. The author suggests two tactics related to contextual links that marketers can use to improve their own website’s SEO rankings:
At Say It for You, we consider two aspects of contextual links to be most important.
For me as content creator for clients in varied fields, “reading around” and “learning around” have become prescriptions for keeping content fresh and engaging. While gathering snippets of O.P.W. (Other People’s Wisdom), I enrich my own knowledge. But then, using contextual links, I get to “share the bounty with others..
In the latest issue of Poets and Writers magazine, Natalie Schriefer describes what she calls her habit of “close reading”. Writing reviews of other people’s writing has made her a better writer, she’s convinced. “I read anything I could get my hands on”, she shares, “jotting down my favorite lines and unusual words.”
“Along the way,” Schriefer adds, “my reviews ended up being so much more useful than just a log of what I’d read. From them I learned how to write about writing, which in turn helped me develop my writing style.” As you read other’s work,” she advises, “consider their characters, plot, imagery, themes, extended metaphors, unexpected twists, and then consider your own intentions for your piece”.
For many years now, I’ve been “preaching” the same message to content writers: In order to create valuable marketing content, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing.
There are a number of reasons what I dub “reading around” is so important for blog writers:
The not-so-secret weapon for us content writers might take the form of an “idea folder” (that folder could be an actual folder in which newspaper and magazine clippings are collected, a little notebook you carry around, or take the form of a digital file on a phone or tablet). We “load up” our folder with ideas for future posts and stay current in the “now” by reading, bookmarking, clipping – and even just noticing – new trends and information relating to each of our clients’ business fields.
With content marketing both a science and an art, it pays to do our own “close reading” so that engaged readers will pay “close attention”!
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Browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble, I came across an entire three-shelf section of self help books. The variety of titles was astounding, perfect examples of how a single topic can be approached in a plethora of ways:. Here are just a few of the titles:
When it comes to content marketing, all the titles show above could be classified as “Huhs?”, meaning that each needs a subtitle to make clear what the book is actually about. “Oh!” titles, we teach at Say It For You, are self-explanatory, and from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint, make a direct connection to the query readers type into their search bar.
For either straightforward or “Huh?-Oh!” titles of blog posts, one way to engage readers is using the sound of the words themselves, repeating vowel sounds (assonance) or consonant sounds (alliteration), so that searchers use their sense of hearing along with the visual.
Just as titles “grabbed” me as a bookstore browser, it’s important to have “ringing” in blog post titles, we teach. Titles matter in two ways:
But when blog content writers try being too clever, too general, or too cliched, that’s not good, either, Authormedia points out in “Top 5 Blog Title Mistakes Authors Make” The overriding criterion is whether you can deliver on your headline promise in the body of the post.
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