Generating creative content in the digital era where almost every topic or trend is bound to have already been explored by some website or another is excruciatingly difficult. How do you make sure your website doesn’t fade away in the sea of millions of other websites competing for rankings and traffic? The answer lies in your content, which probably has more potential than you think.
In fact, the world’s top-ranked companies all use content to their advantage, from Coke’s massively successful ‘Share a Coke’ campaign in 2014 to Google’s compelling ‘Beyond The Map’ video series anticipating the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Content marketing has evolved from being a tool of communication to a full-fledged industry that connects people together from all around the world through strategic initiatives celebrating the beauty and strength of humanity. Crafting a strong online marketing base will secure your company a stable consumer niche and dynamic leads. With 93% of organizations relying on content marketing for brand innovation and demand creation, your content is more important now than ever. Creating content is costly and time-consuming, so you wouldn’t want a situation where your website experiences dwindling traffic and leads thereby negating all the effort and money you invested. Here are three ways to avoid writing content that will never be read by anyone:
Don’t Overdo It
The harsh truth about web development is that people don’t read the way they read traditional print anymore. In the virtual world, people have a very short attention span and patience threshold because the internet is supposed to save time. A research project conducted by Slate found that most visitors only absorb 60% of what they read online, a figure that is astonishingly low compared to the amount of expertise it takes to build a website. If you’re an expert in content marketing, you might also be aware of that ‘F-shaped pattern’ most consumers adopt, from reading horizontally across the upper portion of a page to funnelling their way vertically along the lower portions.
What are the implications of all these findings for creative content directors? It’s the simple fact that online readers are selective in nature. Most of them will take seconds to scan through your piece to locate what they want. If you want to prevent traffic from flowing out of your page, then you should keep it as short as possible. If you can cut words, cut them. Use bullet points wherever you can, and arrange your ideas into neatly-chunked paragraphs. Lengthy articles with no breaks are most likely going to deter potential leads from even skimming through your page.
Promotion Stops When You Stop
If there’s one website that’s read too much, it’s Buzzfeed. Not only does it surpass traditional online players like NBC and FX, but attracts a whopping 200 million unique users each month. To top it off, it’s social media traffic is five times its search traffic. So, what’s the secret behind such gigantic numbers?
What makes Buzzfeed’s content marketing strategy such a huge hit compared to its competitors is its savage promotion on social media websites. Instead of trying to channel traffic to their website and apps through social media, Buzzfeed aggressively publishes highly witty, engaging, and relevant content directly on platforms like Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook, which explains why its social media traffic outpaces that of search engines. Most of these posts might not even drive traffic to its site, but they do engage online millennials and attract more leads. Moreover, each of its articles have multiple sharing links to allow for easy sharing.
Even though it’s rare to find websites pull off such unconventional content marketing strategies, Buzzfeed does provide valuable lessons on the importance of promotion. If you want to grow awareness about your website, then stellar content isn’t enough- you need to actively promote it on several social media platforms. What makes Buzzfeed so successful is that it doesn’t use social media as a space to boost conversion rates, but rather build a strong brand image.
Lack of Commitment (Due to Whatever Reasons)
Nobody said it was going to be easy. We’ve reached an age where 90% of new online start-ups go bust within the first four months. The reality is that content marketing is the kind of industry that’s purely driven by demand and not necessity. We’ll always need doctors, but we won’t always need to visit the same website for something since there are thousands of other substitutes out there.
If you want your website to stay ahead of the game, you’ll have to stay committed to its growth. You will have to come up with creative content that’s both relevant and captivating on a daily basis no matter how hard it is. People always look for fresh content on the web, and if you don’t post new articles from time to time, your website is bound to fade into obscurity and not be read by anyone. Always remember that success doesn’t come overnight: it took Buzzfeed nine years to become the global internet media powerhouse it is today.
Content marketing can be a highly profitable and rewarding strategy for businesses in a web development environment that places emphasis on innovation, ideas, and creativity. It’s no longer about just trying to sell a good or service, but to attach meaning to it through stories and emotions people can relate to. To fully unleash its power, companies should pay attention to their content and keep the aforementioned ways in mind to prevent writing content that is short-lived and underrated.
ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.