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storytelling

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Giving Away the Farm: Why It’s OK to Say a Lot in Your Blog

Information establishes trust

“You’re giving it all away for free in your blog.”

You won’t believe how many prospects have told us exactly that in a meeting. But here’s the thing: more often than not, they hire us anyway. The general consensus is, “If they’re giving this to me and I’m not a client, imagine what I’ll get when I hire them.”

Keeping Your Eye on the Prize

The goal of a blog is to educate and entertain. That means you need to provide valuable information to your readers. Your ideal clients will want even more, and they’ll be likely to pay for the privilege.

People respond to great content that they want to read. Focusing solely on yourself and your company will get you nowhere. Instead, your blogs have to be helpful, useful, and informative. When thinking about blog topics, consider what questions, concerns, or challenges that your customers may have.

The Goal of a Blog

When you stick to providing useful information that is valuable to readers, you don’t have to worry about giving away too much on your blog. You’ll achieve these six things:

  1. You’ll gain credibility because readers will see that you know what you’re talking about
  2. Posts will be shared because people like to help others
  3. You’ll establish yourself as the go-to source for your product or service
  4. Readers get a glimpse into your business practices
  5. You get enhanced visibility across multiple channels
  6. Clients will realize you’re the best and right choice
  7. When you’re creating your content strategy, the best way to get the best results is to know your ideal client and what they want. You have to be clear about your goals, as well. This will create the ultimate connection between your blog and your reader.

You should always keep these in mind as the goal of a blog.

If you struggle to come up with blog topics or how much information to include, think about what your potential customers might be Googling to find what you offer. This will help you discover what information to provide. Don’t worry about giving away too much. It will pay off.

If your blog is a struggle, get in touch with us. We can help you create a strategy that gets your business the visibility it deserves. Let’s talk.

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Social Listening: How It Drives Content Marketing

Social Listening Tips:

Start By Giving Your Audience What They Want

Quality is what you should care most about when it comes to content. Your content needs to provide valuable information and entertain your readers, which will help you build relationships with them. This starts with knowing what they want.

Poor quality content usually reflects little knowledge of the targeted audience and their needs and wants. Personalization is the key to content that connects, but you can’t personalize without listening to your audience and understanding their preferences, interests, and the types of content that they commonly share on social media. Enter social listening tips.

Listen Before You Speak

Taking your audience’s pulse will put you on track for a successful content strategy. You can start by tracking and analyzing behaviors with a piece of content. What’s getting the most clicks? What’s getting shared? This level of social listening will help you understand what your audience and potential customers are all about.

Find Out What People Are Talking About

Where are audiences engaging with your content? The best content strategies are multi-channel, where each channel creates a different opportunity to listen to your people. Discussions change based on the channel, so you need to also know how people are using each one.

Listen to find out what topics are influencing conversations, and you can develop your content strategy to respond in the best way to get the best results. This is social listening tips in a nutshell.

Give People the Content They Want

Social listening lets you understand what people are talking about and what they want. It also helps you identify the types of content that are most engaging. Do you get more response from videos or photos? Or, do you have a high open rate on your email marketing? This information is incredibly valuable in identifying your strategy’s effectiveness and how to plan for the future.

Stay Relevant

Staying relevant in the social scene can be tough because it’s constantly changing. Social listening’s ability to let you track engagement and responses helps you stay at the forefront.

If you need a little help creating content that truly connects with your audience, give us a call. Let us help you tap into your audience and give them what they want.

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The Basics of Brand Storytelling

Making your brand memorable

Brand Storytelling is a powerful marketing tool for your brand or business. Having a compelling story humanizes your brand and opens yourself up for a customer connection.

To write your story, look to classic storytelling techniques, like strong characters, a theme, and an interesting structure. Getting the story right will pay off because it makes you memorable. These storytelling basics will help you build your brand.

Get Personal

People, especially younger adults, hate dealing with a faceless corporation, so the more personal you can make your business seem, the better. Don’t sugar coat aspects of your story; instead highlight any ups and downs that make you seem interesting. Another way to show your personality is to highlight the key people that make the brand successful.

All of this helps people get to know you, which will make them like and trust you. This will turn them into actual customers and create brand loyalty.

Pick a Pattern

Sometimes, it can be tough to know where to start with your story. Many tried-and-true story structures can help you get started, and using a recognizable pattern helps your audience know what comes next. Though they may be predictable, these story patterns are classic for a reason. Here are some examples: hero’s journey, coming of age, personal triumph, or quest. You can always throw in a surprise or two.

Focus on the Human Element

Facts and figures may be persuasive, but stories are memorable. Powerful stories create an emotional connection that people will respond to. Avoid any moral-of-the-story clichés that tell audiences what they should be feeling or force an emotion; instead, let your readers draw their own conclusions and feel what comes naturally.

Paint a Picture

The phrase “show, don’t tell” exists for a reason because it’s a valuable storytelling technique. Painting a picture creates a visual for your audience to imagine and makes your brand more interesting and memorable. Appeal to the senses through descriptions and visuals, such as photos and infographics.

Stories have power. In marketing, any strategy that makes your business or brand stand out is winning. Let’s talk about how we can build a strong brand storytelling strategy to promote your business.

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Does Your Content Have a Good Enough Call to Action?

Let readers know what’s in it for them

A call to action is the most important element of your content. Blogs and email newsletters aim to educate and entertain. Paired with the call to action, the piece will inspire an action.

Phrases like “learn more,” “download now,” or “call us” start readers on the path to becoming customers. A good call to action, sometimes referred to as a CTA, makes your marketing efforts more effective. Here’s how to write a powerful, well-positioned CTA.

Create a Powerful Punch

Keep this in mind when writing your CTA: the reader is already on your site or reading your content. Since they’re already engaging with you, you have the power. You just have to go the extra step to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

The simple answer is to give them something in exchange for email address or other valuable information. What should you give? A free consultation, a free trial, discounts, e-books, or white paper. The point is to build trust by establishing you value.

The most powerful CTAs give readers direction on what to do next with your content. And, you can measure your click-through rates to determine how successful your strategy is.

Position and Polish the CTA

In the copy, you have to answer the “What’s in it for me” question. And, spice up the CTA. “Get a free quote” or “add to cart and get 25%” are some examples of effective calls to action.

Also make sure that the CTA stands out — maybe by using your brand’s colors or plenty of whitespace. Don’t ask readers for too much information, or they probably won’t follow through.

Placement is another consideration for the best interaction. On your homepage, at the bottom of a blog post, or as a pop-up box are some positioning options so that your CTA is easy to interact with.

Need some help with your content? Let’s talk.