5 Outrageously Simple Content Tips that Your Competitors Aren't Doing

Content-Strategy

Content Marketing Works!

Content marketing is one area where businesses have gradually paid more attention to. According to the 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, content marketers are using more tactics this year (12) compared to last year (8) and used social media more (87% this year compared to 74% in 2012) to distribute their content.

More importantly, 33% of businesses are spending on content marketing; 7% more compared to last year.

Why must you, as a developer and/or site owner, be aware of these stats?

As more and more businesses start investing in content marketing (as the trends suggest), they’ll start building effective strategies that encourage site visitors to participate in their site’s conversion funnel and become potential customers. With enough practice and application, these marketers will soon become efficient in implementing tactics for their content marketing and increase their customer base.

As a marketer, you don’t want to get left behind your competitors. In fact, you’ll want to rise up to the challenge of delivering highly targeted content to your market by standing out and getting yourself noticed!

While people will be busy following tactics by the book, start thinking laterally by using these rarely-used content ideas to boost your marketing strategy.

Really Simple Content Tactics for your Website

1. Turn quotations into attractive images

Looking for free images under the Creative Commons license can be painstaking since most of those under this license are limited and do not complement your content pieces. While high-quality stock photos seem to be an ideal alternative, you’ll have to shell out money to download a certain number of images a day.

If you’re looking for free and high-targeted images to use for your content, why not take quotations related to your topic and turn them into images using Quozio?

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Simply search quotes from Goodreads or BrainyQuote, copy the quote appropriate to your content, go to Quozio, and paste the quote. Choose from the number of templates for your quote before saving the image on your computer. Voila – easy image for your content!

Best of all…it’s FREE!

Despite the app being free, it is best practice to link the create image quote to Quozio to give proper credit to the site.

2. Use movies/TV shows as article topics and relate them to your business

People line up in cinemas to see blockbuster films or stream the latest episode of their favorite series. Those are good enough reasons why you should use movies and TV shows as your topic points to develop your content. Another reason is that titles of mainstream shows have high search volume that you can use to bring users who searched about the movie or TV show on search engines to your site!

Here are some good template titles you can use to lead off with your article:

What [Professional in specific industry] Can Learn from [Movie]
[Number] Things that [Fictional Character] Teach You about [Industry]
What Pisses Me Off about [Movie] as a [Professional in specific industry]

What can Web Developers learn from Michael Corleone?

The possibilities are simply endlessCase in point, Italian mob films are more than just exercises in excess and brutality – they also display wisdom that translates well in business. At least that’s what Dory Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications, saw in Scarface’s Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, as having traits of great businessmen. Also, The Godfather franchise can help you learn tips on retaining customers for your small business. 

While this tactic has been done before, it’s surprising how few businesses have actually written this content type to promote their products and services, if not for branding purposes. 

3. Discuss content on social media

In social media, there are people who simply “make noise” and those who actually contribute something valuable to users in their network. Amateur marketers are guilty of making noise when promoting their business. Instead of coming up with the plan to reach out their target audience effectively, these marketers post multiple times about how great their products are and that everybody should buy. They end of sounding like this:

“Hey guys!! Look at me!! Visit my site cuz it’s awesome!! [link]

Instead of the guy being ignored, you want to be the guy who engages and actually gets a reaction from other users. It’s not an easy task, but it’s all about being authentic with how you communicate with others.

You can simply turn your content as point of discussions in social media. Link to your content and ask them the applicable questions below.

        • Do you believe in what the article’s trying to say?
        • Are there any more suggestions you’d want to make?
        • Did the post miss out on valuable information?

 

People respond better to this approach of promoting your content on social media because (and here’s the catch)…you’re not really promoting it! What you ultimately want to achieve in doing this is to get more ideas from thought leaders in the group about your content. Discussing your content, in this case, is a form of research that lets you confirm what you already know and what you need to improve on. The traffic you receive from these sites are just secondary.

Where can you start your discussions?

You can start by going to Google+ Communities. It is similar to LinkedIn Groups where you can search for groups to join related to your industry and network from there. However, Communities is a fairly new social media platform that has more vibrant users more than willing to comment and make connections with you. Take your outreach to a whole new level with Google+ Hangouts, allowing you to chat with multiple users at the same time!

4. Curate the best Content

There comes a time when you can’t come up with new things to say about your business or that everything that needs to be discussed about a topic has already been done by othersThat said, use this seeming disadvantage to your benefitfeature their posts on your article instead!

Like an art curator, select the best content you can find online (article, infographic, video) about your topic and showcase them on your post. 

Best,” in this case, does not mean popular or simply ranks high in search engine. Rather, the best kind of content offers insight and useful advice that goes in line with what you want to say. Therefore, use due diligence when selecting content to feature on your post. 

Below are examples of curated post that should help you understand the mentality behind compiling content for your post. 

      • There’s a reason why Social Media Examiner’s post titled “24 Must Have Social Media Marketing Tools” continues to be one of the most visited post on the site. For every item featured on the post has a short write-up describing why it is one of the must-have tools for social media marketing.
      • Publishing design inspiration posts isn’t new territory to websites geared towards design and graphics. However, what separates a good inspiration post from the rest is the quality and quantity of the images featured on the post. Since four years after its release, Logo Designer Blog’s “400+ Creative Business Card Designs” remains one of the most awe-inspiring design posts ever.
      • Sean Platt’s “100 Blog Post Ideas: (Turning Your Brainstorming Into Autopilot)” works on so many levels despite not actually compiling “content.”  Aside from the quantity, the simplicity of the ideas work to the advantage of the post, which makes readers scratch their heads and ask, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” 

5. Turn your articles into slideshows

Marketers are using infographics (38%) and e-books (32%) as alternatives to present data and information other than articles. Both tactics can help assist in your efforts to generate more leads and boost site traffic. Due to the increase in usage of both content types, why not go for the type that’s rarely usedslideshows?

Turn your content into a slideshow by focusing more on the visual aspect of your content and have it hosted on Slideshare. You can then embed the presentation from slideshare to your blog or article. Marketing sage Seth Godin offers sound advice on how to create an effective presentation here

Using slideshows as content is not just because it’s a novel concept! 

With slideshows, their visual impacthits a different demographic in your target market, who prefer viewing content instead of reading it.