There are many many many many ways to market your brand.
In today’s age, (according to MarketingProfs and Junta42) 78% of all businesses reported using content to promote brand awareness. 69% attribute valuable content as the main source of customer retention and loyalty. And although there are many more channels of value that content brings to both the consumer and business, 63% of B2B marketers use content as their key lead-generation source. A huge percentage of marketers are now actively investing into this type of marketing, and it just makes sense.
58% of users prefer to watch video content over anything else according to Hubspot (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-trends-preferences) and social media platforms are prioritizing this very much as it’s the best way to get and keep attention from fellow humans. The longer people are on their platforms, the more $ they get. It’s that simple.
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The biggest impact will be 15-30 second videos.
Tik Tok has successfully beat out Youtube in user watch time even though Youtube has been the number one source for online video content since its inception in 2005. Tik Tok was launched in 2016 and still they stole the show using straight up psychology. People naturally have lower attention spans, it’s biological and useful in how we lived thousands of years ago. Recently this has been kicked into overdrive as we continue to bombard ourselves with up to 4-10k pieces of content daily on average. It’s no wonder we get bored so easily.
With the internet fully saturated with high quality content, how do you stand out? The number one way humans operate in the world is visually and socially. Videos trick our brain into thinking we’re seeing both.
So now that we know videos are the key ingredient to any good marketing strategy, how do we get our videos seen? We use psychology to shape our content.
They should hit as many of the following notes as possible, some are more important than others but that will always depend on who you are marketing to specifically.
- 3-5 second HOOK (gets their attention and explains how the next 10 seconds will benefit them)
- Gives value (they learned something new that can benefit them in real life)
- Evokes emotion (something that makes them laugh or cry – in a good way)
- Is Relatable (we’re all humans and there’s always a common denominator in any situation, you just have to find it)
- Encourages them to communicate with you and others (engagement)
- Keep it short (the more concise your message, the less time they spend watching/reading – value their time and they will value you)
Ask yourself these questions when looking at your final piece of content before you post
Is this going to make people stop scrolling?
Are they going to care enough to keep watching?
What are they getting out of this (Creator: attention, leads, fans, referrals, etc. | Viewer: valuable knowledge, a positive change in emotional state, a new perspective, etc.)
How do you want them to engage? comment, save, or share?
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Email | Newsletters | Blogs
Email marketing is still one of the top ways to generate leads in an impactful and simple way.
Create a weekly/monthly newsletter for your company.
Imagine you are about to get on a FaceTime call with your friend who you haven’t seen in a while. You both tell each other what you have been up to, what’s the latest and greatest, what you have planned. So why not treat your fans as friends.
Make a simple but consistent newsletter that gets people to read it. If what you are saying is interesting to them they’ll keep reading it week after week, and some might begin to look forward to it. This is also a great way to promote any other valuable content you might have made throughout the week, give them the highlights, the breakdown, the scoop. Keep it easy and informative for them and they will appreciate you more than you’ll ever know. Link to your longer blog but give them the summary. Show your most viewed post of the week and explain it in your words. Share the most re-tweeted tweet and highlight your favorite comment. There’s so many ways to approach this and you will need to try and try and try again, but be consistent!
THREE
Repurpose your old or unused content.
You should be getting in the habit of taking some time aside to rehash your successes and failures of content and see if they can live once more in another body.
The best way to utilize this is to take your strength, whether it’s writing (blogs/articles), speaking (podcast, interviews), or making videos (editing, telling stories visually), and then focus on that.
Let’s say you are really a terrible writer, you couldn’t write a blog to save your life and you’re not at the point yet where you can hire a copy writer or maybe you just don’t see the value in it. You can’t really edit videos either, it’s not your strength. BUT you can hold a conversation pretty well. In fact you are genuinely curious and can’t help but to ask questions. Invite your friend, your partner, your customers, your peers, experts you are interested in to have a casual recorded conversation. You can record it on your phone or as a video, whichever you are more likely to do.
Let’s call this your source content: In this example we’ll use the word Podcast loosely.
What that can turn into is:
- Transcript turns into a written article
- Pull out highlights from written article and tweet them, or make a simple IG post/story with text.
- Save those posts and throw them up on pinterest.
- Pull out clips from the podcast and throw them up on youtube, use your logo if you didn’t video record it.
- Include the link to the podcast in your newsletter and write up a simple summary of what was discussed.
- Hire an actor to make a video using the highlights as a script.
You can see where I am going with this, you can easily be great at making videos but none of the rest, so you can talk about something you’re passionate about and hire a freelance editor to clip out the highlights and add graphics. The only thing that’s stopping you right now is fear. You have to accept that putting yourself out there for the whole world to potentially see is a scary thought. Are you going to be a brave business owner or a scared one? It’s your choice.
No matter which approach you take, your content needs to be Authentic and Valuable to your consumer always, or else you’re just wasting your time and throwing your money into the fire pit of bad content and lame ads.