How to Push the Content Marketing Boundaries

When it comes to content marketing, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Following content creation best practices can help to ensure you’re relaying meaningful messages and reaching your readers, but how can you go the extra distance?

Once you have a detailed blueprint of your content marketing plan, it’s time to fill it with ground breaking content. Give these seven tips a try to create content that resonates with your audiences and ultimately moves the needle:

1. Drive strong emotions: Creating content that makes people feel sad, mad, happy or excited can really get an audience to empathize with your message! Making readers relate emotionally can serve as powerful marketing magic.
2. Create diversity: When you’re tasked with creating a lot of content, it’s easy to get comfortable turning out the traditional “intro, body, conclusion” blog posts, but that can get stale before you know it. Spice things up by offering your audience plenty of variety. Try switching up the content medium or testing out some different post formats.
3. Add color and imagery: Words are great and all, but they aren’t necessarily known for their curb appeal. Adding color, images and graphics to your content will grab attention and spark interest with your readers. Also consider distilling large paragraphs into more meaningful graphics or representations.
4. Go the extra mile: Giving people more than what they expect gives you a leg up on your competitors. When it comes to content marketing, go the extra mile and offer upgrades to accompany your original piece. This can be as robust as an extensive white paper that you choose to gate, or as simple as a downloadable checklist.
5. Create effective CTA’s: When you craft meaningful content, you’re not only shooting for people to read it, but also take action afterwards. Incorporating effective CTA’s will inspire your audience to interact and engage with the content, which in turn will help you measure your content strategy successes! Also consider conducting A/B testing on your content and calls-to-action so you can evaluate what’s working for you.
6. Fresh direction: Finding subjects that haven’t been previously covered can be tough. But taking an existing topic and putting a personal and fresh spin on it can lift it to new levels. When crafting content around an already covered topic, be sure to let your personality shine through and that alone can provide a fresh perspective.
7. Support with a story: There is a reason content marketers use stories in their work: human brains tend to be hardwired to remember them, which is a powerful communications tool. Support your message with a real-life story and it will make it extra relatable to your readers and easily memorable! Also consider tapping subject matter experts or industry veterans to weigh in or pepper with comments for an added touch.

By following these simple tips and avoiding common content marketing mistakes, you can take your content from bland and boring to above average. Now that you’ve got the tools to get some solid, high-quality content under your belt, keep an eye out for our helpful guide to properly distributing it!