Content marketing is required for success in today's competitive business world. No matter which industry you are in, your website visitors want high-quality, information-rich, high-impact and captivating content with deep industry insight. We are in the midst of the information age; your prospects do a significant amount of research, comparing you to your top competitors. How can you distinguish your company and win content marketing game? A top-notch company blog is the foundation for winning content marketing. If you have committed to content marketing, you may as well dive in, and grant your content marketing some superpowers.
Achieving high rates of social content curation-social sharing-is now vital to SEO and the ranking of search engine results pages (SERPS). Each time someone shares your content with their network of friends and industry contacts, it gets a stamp of approval-increasing its reach and amplifying your chances for higher rates of traffic and lead generation. The need to create content, which readers find valuable enough to share, will ultimately improve the quality of online marketing and the Internet as a whole.
There are no shortcuts to producing highly shareable content, which calls for vision, creativity, a deep knowledge base and a sophisticated understanding of your industry. Consistently creating valuable, relevant and share-worthy content will inevitably improve your search rankings, which are increasingly taking into account the social exposure and influence of content and the authors who create it. Creating highly shareable content will get others to promote your content for you. While originality is an important goal of content creation, highly shared content does have some common characteristics.
Highly Shareable Content Defined
1. It has no typos, spelling or grammatical errors.
2. It features fresh ideas and innovative best practices.
3. Highly shareable content is not overly "salesy" and avoids a primary focus on pushing products or services.
4. It maintains breadth and depth of subject matter.
5. It has captivating images.
6. Highly shareable content leverages newsjacking of hot industry-relevant news.
7. It highlights industry thought leadership.
8. Highly shared titles are actionable, concise, clear, descriptive, authoritative, intriguing and sometimes even a little mysterious.
9. Highly shearable content includes information-rich and captivating infographics.
10. It is visually striking and presented in an organized fashion.
5 Ways to Make Your Content More Formidable
1. Create Easy-to-Process Content
Everyone with an Internet browser is inundated with content on a daily basis. The best way to keep people reading your content is to structure it so that it can be easily skimmed over. Paragraphs should have headlines, and main points should be put into numbered lists and bullet points. People may not want to read every single point you make; this practice allows them to skip some information and search for what they find most intriguing, which increases your chances of high rates of content curation.
2. Utilize Industry-Leading Topics Trending on Social Media
Do not create content until you have utilized the right resources to determine what is trending. Check out Social Media Today, LinkedIn Today and Twitter to discover the most popular industry trends. Topsy actually sorts content from the entire Internet by topic. You can also use Klout to find industry experts and leading content creators.
3. Serve the Needs of Your Audience
Your company blog should reflect the most common issues and FAQs that are voiced by your readers, prospects and clients. Informative content that can help solve current challenges will help your customers and your business. Do not create irrelevant content. Do not bore your readers by focusing on your company's own products and services. According to MarketingProfs, only 40% of B2B marketing agencies create content that offers solutions for prospective and current clients.
4. Promote and Syndicate Your Content
Provide your readers with unique, high-quality and relevant content to enhance SEO, amplify website traffic, and increase your chances of reaching out to potential clients in a wider captive audience. Utilize the big four social networks-LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook-to publicize your content. To augment your chances of reaching your target audience, also consider using syndication sites like Business 2 Community and Social Media Today. In addition, embed social sharing buttons on your blog to encourage content curation.
5. Use Highly Shareable Content Types
Be aware of the types content that are most likely to be shared on social media so that you can increase traffic, lead generation and your status as an industry thought leader. The following are highly shareable content types:
- Juicy content that triggers emotions
- Visual content, such as videos, infographics and SlideShare presentations
- Statistics, graphs and tables
- Longer, in-depth content, such as ebooks and whitepapers
- Newsjacked content
- Hybrid content, which mixes mediums like infographics, video and written content
Create content that demands to be read and shared on social media, because it is high-quality, information-rich, fresh and relevant. Without high-quality content creation, you will be unable to generate social capital with your content, and your website and business as a whole may suffer as a result. Do not get left behind. Create highly shareable content to gain recognition as an industry thought leader, increase your reach, generate and convert more leads, and land more new business.