 The Internet is awash with content in every niche you can imagine. Even small, local brick-and-mortar businesses are blogging, making YouTube videos, and driving traffic to their websites. So how can you possibly break through all this noise? Here are 10 ways to make your content stand out from all the rest. Create your own tone and style. With your target audience in mind, create a specific way of writing that’s unique to you. Get personal. Share details about your life and relate to your audience on a personal level. Don’t go overboard talking about nothing but yourself, but pepper the useful information you’re sharing with personal details. Become a master storyteller. Learn how to tell stories and make them a central part of your content. Each story is unique and will help to make your content engaging and effective. Get specific. Narrow it down to a very specific segment of your market that others aren’t speaking to. Focus on diving deep into sub-topics others haven’t covered. Stay in the know. Subscribe to email newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and other sources of up-to-date information in your niche. Try to be the first to report on news stories and cover up-and-coming topics. Following a variety of content creators will also give you more ideas on how to set your content apart. Search for ideas in unlikely places. Follow content in other niches. Always be on the lookout for ideas when you read the news, watch TV, talk to friends, or work your regular job. Sometimes you’ll get an idea on another topic that you can use in your content. Create great brainstorming sessions. Set aside time purely for idea generation. Use various brainstorming techniques and get every idea down. Later, you can go through your list and evaluate each. Take the opposite position. Find something that’s common wisdom in your niche and write from the other position. An example would be to write something like, “Social Media is Finished” What if it’s not actually finished? You can use this as a title and angle for the piece to grab readers’ attention. Explore new platforms and marketing channels. Find out what the kids are using these days and see if you can be the first in your niche to be active there. Stake your claim early on new platforms and your content marketing there will be unique. Try something new. Make it a point to regularly try something new. Your content mix should always include something you’ve never done before. You may hit on a novel and unique way of doing things nobody else is doing. Stay open-minded and always be on the lookout for ways to make yourself unique. Try to gain an understanding of what makes you stand out from others so you can play into this in your content marketing. Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.
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 The primary purpose of your content is to engage your audience. In order to do this, you have to offer what they want to read, not simply what you’d like to write about. So, how do you continually offer information that your audience will read and love? There’s an easy trick and if you keep this in mind, you’ll never run out of great ideas: Solve your audience members’ problems. How Does Your Audience Look for Information? Put yourself in your audience members’ shoes. You have a difficult problem you’re looking for help with. No matter what you do, you just can’t find a solution. You’d naturally search online to find answers to this question. If you found a piece of content that offered a simple, easy-to-understand solution you can implement right now and get results, how would you feel? You’d remember the website where you found the information and see what else they have to offer. This is the kind of reaction you want to get from your content. The next step is to keep this person with you and start to build a relationship. Again, think about your audience’s perception. Once they start following you, they come to see you as a go-to source for help with their problems. They know they can find the assistance they need from your content. Learn About Your Audience and Their Problems In order to solve your customers’ problems, the first step is to get to know them. Start by creating a target customer profile. This should include demographic information about your ideal customers, but also their attitudes and values. It should include specific problems they seek help with. The best way to create this profile and keep learning about your audience is to research online. Find out where they hang out and connect with them there. Follow them on social media and read their comments. You can also reach out to them and ask about their goals and challenges. Pay especially close attention to problems they face and questions they ask. Make a list and see if you can provide solutions through your content. Building a Relationship with Your Audience You don’t have to solve every problem your audience faces through your free content, and you can’t. But if you can provide a bit of help that they can implement and get immediate results, you can then start building a relationship with them. Consistently provide the help they need and somewhere down the line, they’ll buy from you when they need it. Each piece of content should include a call-to-action where you offer further free content and other types of help. Ask them to connect with you on social media, sign up for your email list, or download your free information product. Keep them engaged through helpful content and you’ll develop a strong relationship that will lead to sales. Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.  You need a great deal of content to keep your audience engaged and build a strong relationship with them. Once you’ve established this relationship, you can offer products and services and your audience members will buy. But if you’re just getting started, you may be wondering, what exactly should you be writing about? Here are a few ways to think up great content ideas so you’ll never run out of things to write about. What Can You Teach? What do you know that you can teach others? You have skills and expertise that most people don’t have. Sharing this knowledge through your content will produce a ton of value for your audience. Teach people what you know and make it easy to for them to understand and consume. How Do You Help People? How have you helped people in the past? Think back to encounters you’ve had with your customers where you’ve answered questions or offered other types of help. If you see a common question you’ve been asked time and time again, this probably is something many more people need help with. This would be a great topic for a piece of content. What Does Your Audience Want to Know? Establish points of contact with your audience and listen to them when they express their concerns and needs. Follow people on social media and other places online where you can participate in conversations and read comments. You can also ask your audience members directly what problems they need help with, and then see if you can help them. Some places to look for ideas on your audience’s needs include: Social Media. Follow your audience members on social media. See what they post, what comments they make, and what other businesses they follow for help with their problems. Blog Posts. Check out blogs in your niche and look at their comments. People will often ask questions in the comments related to the topics covered in the post. Question and Answer Sites. Look at Q&A sites like Quora where you’ll find people asking questions for the community to answer. You can answer these questions through blog posts or other types of content. Other Content Creators. Follow other content creators in your niche to see what they’re writing about. Don’t forget podcasts, YouTube channels, and social media. Don’t cover the exact same topics but use their content to get ideas on what’s trending and gaps you can fill. Keep an Idea File The above is enough to get you started. Start building an idea file. When you sit down to create content, you’ll often have to brainstorm to get you started. Instead of needing to brainstorm a new topic each time you write, you can refer to your idea file to simply pick one and get started. Find some other good sources of ideas and bookmark them. When you need further ideas, you can refer to these sites. Remember that marketing is all about trial and error. Try something new and see how your audience responds. Sometimes a totally unique idea will give you a piece of viral content. Keep track of what your audience likes, and you’ll be able to find more great ideas for them. Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.  Before you start diving into content marketing, you need to have a solid plan in place. This plan describes your strategy with a big-picture view so you know exactly where you’re headed, and you can make the right decisions along the way to get you there. It also increases your efficiency by preventing you from wasting time on activities or channels that won’t help you reach your goal. A content marketing plan is just like any business’s marketing plan, but it relates specifically to your content. It’s a document that succinctly explains what your plan is all about. Mission Statement Your plan should include a mission statement. This explains the “why” behind what you do. Another way to think of it is, how does your business seek to make the world a better place? Your mission statement is the ultimate reason why you’re creating this content. Target Market Profile A key component of your content marketing plan is a profile of your target market. This is the person, described as a specific individual, who most benefits from your content and products and services. You’ll appeal to others as well, but this is where you want to focus your energy and you’ll get the most results. It should include demographics as well as psychological factors such as values, attitudes, and problems they face. The Nuts and Bolts of Your Content Marketing Identify the types of content and topics you’ll cover and where you will engage your audience with this content. The target market includes where your audience members spend time online and what help they’re looking for. This part of the plan describes practically how you will engage your audience and where. Your Unique Value Proposition Your plan should explain your unique value proposition, or UVP. The UVP explains how you uniquely meet the needs of your audience. If you haven’t thought about what makes you unique, this is a good time to do so. Your UVP demonstrates your position in the market and the reason why people would choose to consume your content rather than a competitor’s. Set Key Performance Indicators Included in your plan should be KPIs, or key performance indicators. These are the metrics you will use to determine whether or not you’re reaching your goals. Choose only the most important metrics that will help you monitor success. It could be a sales target, audience size, or number of interactions to show engagement. As you implement your plan, you’ll use your KPIs to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. There is no magic bullet that will make your content marketing a success, but your plan gets down the basic outline and you can always modify it later as your content marketing evolves. What’s most important is just to have a plan in place to get you started. Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. |
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