Christopher Earle: In a Content Marketing Slump? Spice up Your Program with These Tips

Wednesday, 8 February 2017

In a Content Marketing Slump? Spice up Your Program with These Tips

How can you turn out haute cuisine content on a fast food production schedule?

Your content team—especially if it’s a team of one—can be on the hook for creating a vast quantity of content. Between sales enablement, eBooks, white papers, and blog posts, it can be overwhelming.

The temptation to churn out uncreative but passable content is hard to resist, especially if you’re behind on the editorial calendar. This kind of rushed content can lead to each piece having a same-y feel—same format, same voice, same structure.

Not only is bland content hard for your readers to stomach, it’s not particularly inspiring to create, either. If you’re feeling like a short order cook instead of a celebrity chef, try these tips to spice things up.

#1: Freshen Up Your Research

A great content marketing initiative starts with thorough customer research. When you started your strategy, it was based on solid intel intended to help you create best answer content. Research shouldn’t be a one-and-done proposition, though. It’s important to keep evaluating, optimizing, and adjusting.

If your audience is unenthusiastic about your content, it’s time to refresh your research. First, see how your published content is performing. What’s resonating with your audience? How can you expand on the topics that are getting the most attention?

Then, revisit your sources for customer information—everything from Google analytics to customer surveys. See if there are questions that still don’t have answers. Or better yet, look for opportunities to answer questions they haven’t asked yet.

#2: Find a New Point of View

Ever feel like you’re repeating yourself in your content? Ever feel like you’re repeating yourself in your content? It’s understandable. You have the same team writing content to support the same solutions with the same talking points—at some point it’s going to feel repetitive.

So if you ever feel like you’re repeating yourself in your content, seek out new voices in your organization. Interview someone in sales, someone in customer service, someone in the C-suite. Sit down for a face-to-face if possible, and record audio for a podcast or create a video at the same time. You’ll end up with a fresh take on your content, a new authentic voice, and a spot filled in the editorial calendar with minimal effort.

#3: Balance Your Funnel

Part of a solid content strategy is developing content for the entire marketing funnel:

Attract content has broad appeal (while still being relevant to the target audience). It seeks to gain attention and define a problem.
Engage content is for people who are already aware they have a problem. It seeks to educate and entertain, while promoting the idea that the reader needs to take action to solve their problem.
Convert content is for those who are committed to solving their problem, and focuses on why your particular solution is the right choice.

Frequently, marketers feel pressured to write the bulk of their content for the Convert stage, as that content links most directly to revenue. But the majority of content consumed is in the Attract stage—so it makes sense to create great top-of-funnel content with clear next steps.

Conversely, if you find your content is getting a lot of social media love and pageviews, but it’s not translating to revenue, you may be missing the middle or bottom of the funnel. Balancing out your content load to cover the entire funnel will help guide customers to a purchase decision, while adding much-needed variety to your content offering.

#4: Change Up the Format

If your content is solid but is failing to inspire engagement, it may be the structure, not the content, that’s the problem. Try changing up the format: If the white page isn’t getting traction, distil the main points into an infographic. If the podcast is failing to connect, transcribe it into a blog post or add a visual element. If your blog posts are a snooze, add some fun images.

If you can serve up a variety of creative content forms, you can keep your audience engaged (and stave off your own boredom, too).

#5: Let Your Customers Do the Talking

Study after study shows that modern buyers want content that is authentic and transparent, like a handmade artisanal window. It’s definitely worth bringing your unique human voice into the content you create. But one of the best ways to create truly authentic content is to let your customers do the job for you.

The traditional case study is one way to go about it, as long as you give it a compelling narrative. Case studies can get too by-the-numbers if we’re not careful: “Customer had problem. Customer got our solution. Customer saw results.”

Focus on the people behind the story, instead: “Bob has a degree in Library Science. Now he’s ordering supplies for an oil rig. Lives are on the line if he gets the wrong brand of toilet paper.”

Letting customers tell their own stories works even better than case studies. You can use a custom hashtag on social media to collect submissions, then offer recognition and praise to anyone who submits a story. If your brand has a presence on visual sites like Instagram, you can quickly gather enough photos and stories to make a truly compelling blog post.

Variety Is the Spice of Life

With the sheer volume of content most marketers are called on to produce, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. If you feel like your content is turning bland, add spice: pepper in fresh research, ask your co-workers for sage advice, gingerly experiment with new formats, and curry favor with customers for user-generated content. With these five tips, you can have a tastier content mix in no thyme.

Need help creating and executing your culinary content strategy? Learn more about our content marketing services.

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