As any contemporary business will know, content marketing plays a major role in any business’ effort. You need content for your email marketing campaigns, your social media pages, your business blog, your website… the list goes on.
There will always be times when you come to a crossroads with your content marketing and aren’t sure how to continue. This guide is designed to give you some simple content marketing tips that are guaranteed to work, time and time again.
Read on to discover what those tips are…
1. Create a Curiosity Gap
The title of your article or blog post should be the last thing you write after completing the post. This is because you never know what sort of direction your content is going to take as it evolves into a completed piece.
Your title needs to be compelling enough to persuade readers to click through and read on. It should be intriguing, mysterious and interesting, all while being completely accurate to the content of your article (use clickbait headlines at your peril). There are plenty of ways to appeal to your readers simply by writing a compelling title. Titles beginning with ‘How To’ and ‘Top 5 Tips…’ have been proven to generate high click through rates (see here for top blog titles that improve lead generation).
2. Use Numbers
In today’s society we are overloaded with information, which has led to poor concentration levels and the desire to scan through easily digestible articles, rather than reading bulk text. As such, articles featuring numbered lists have been proven to boost retention levels and increase likes, comments and shares. Specifically, digits have also demonstrated higher levels of shareability, instead of writing out the entire number (i.e. ‘Top 5 Tips’ instead of ‘Top Five Tips’). Finally, long lists have proven particularly popular, generating the greatest number of shares.
3. Know your Exact Audience
You can’t expect to craft meaningful content if you don’t know who your exact audience is. Use language geared towards your precise target market, being careful with your choice of words, avoiding slang or jargon where necessary and carefully selecting the length of your sentences.
By crafting your content around your audience, your audience will respond better to your messages. The best way to determine whether you are appropriately crafting your content around your audience is to test everything.
4. Use the Right Words in your titles
Studies have discovered that using words such as ‘no’, ‘stop’ and ‘without’ in your titles leads to more shares than words such as ‘do’ or ‘start’. Furthermore, the following list of words has been proven to be more popular within headlines:
- Smart
- Surprising
- Science
- Critical
- Huge
- Hacks
- History
If you are going to tweet a post, opt for the following words:
- You
- Free
- Media
- Please
- Great
- 10
- Follow
- How to
- Top
- Check out
- New blog post
5. Choose Verbs over Nouns
In a study carried out by social media scientist, Dan Zarrella, he discovered that tweets using adverbs and verbs had a higher click through rate than those using nouns and adjectives. This is because verbs are generally stronger in meaning compared with nouns or adjectives, and have a far more persuasive influence over readers.
6. Make it Surprising
Using the word ‘surprising’ in your titles helps to capture the attention of your audience more easily while also maintaining their interest as they make their way through the articles. We often try to use the word ‘surprising’ in our blog posts at 8 Ways Media, for instance:
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Articles of this nature have been proven to be more interesting and stimulating to the reader, thus attracting their attention more easily and keeping them interested for longer.
7. Avoid Announcements
Research has found that posts with the words ‘announcing’ ‘celebrates’ and ‘wins’ generated the least amount of likes and shares. To contrast, posts with the word ‘lose’ led to a higher number of shares, suggesting that negative words are more shareable than positive ones.
8. Get Visual
To avoid going down the announcement route, instead opt to create a story with pictures, a timeline of events and even an infographic. Everyone loves a good story, and telling stories is a fundamental communication method that triggers our brains, activating certain parts of the brain and essentially putting the entire organ to work.
As you can see there are plenty of ways to craft powerful, creative content that boosts likes, comments and shares. What techniques are you using within you content marketing? Leave us a comment to let us know!
If you would like help with your next content marketing strategy, get in touch today to find out how 8 Ways Media can help you.
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