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Your Business’ 2018 New Year Resolution: 5 Steps to Improving Your Content and Customer Base
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DECEMBER 2018
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What is your business’ resolution for 2018? Do you want to grow your customer base? It makes sense, as a wider customer base would mean more sales, more publicity, and higher profits. You can accomplish all these with content marketing, on the condition that you keep up with the trends.
What are the trends for content creation in 2018? While the whole world seems to embrace artificial intelligence, at Iris Content, we expect content marketing to continue to focus on storytelling and on the bond between the writer and the audience.
Since 90% of marketers use content in their marketing strategy, your only chance to stand out is to take your content to the next level, to make it more useful, more personal, and easier to relate to. Here are five tips that will definitely help you improve your content in 2018.
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Photograph by Bychykhin Olexandr via Bigstock
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5 Infallible Content Marketing Tips for 2018
1. Never Take Your Eyes and Ears off Your Target Audience
If you want to draw the attention of your target audience, now that they are being bombed with content from all sides, you need to provide exactly what they want. This means getting to know them. You can do that by conducting surveys, following their social media reactions, requesting, analyzing, and applying their feedback.
If you are not writing yourself, make sure the person in charge of your company’s content in 2018 is a good psychologist. Knowing who the readers are and what needs they have is just one part of the equation. The most important part is putting that information to good use and creating content that meets the needs of your audience, stirs interest, and shows how much you care and how committed to their satisfaction you are.
2. Do Not Neglect the Power of Proof
When content marketing was merely at its beginning, everything you wrote had the potential to go viral. People did not double check the information you provided, and even if they wanted to, sometimes, they couldn’t. You could have interpreted and distorted facts to your advantage, without anyone noticing or doing something about it.
Things don’t work like that anymore. When you promise someone they will accomplish their goals or fulfill their needs using your products or services, instead of running to buy them, they will want to know how long everything would take and how your products and services work. Even if you explain that, they will still look at your competitors’ offers just to be sure they make the best deal.
To avoid disappointing your audience, do things right from the beginning. Build your content on facts. Use only reliable sources and give them credit. Include numbers and statistics, and support your ideas with solid arguments. This way, even those who disagree with what you (your content provider) wrote will respect you.
3. Make Sure Your Content Is Readable
As Neil Patel wrote for Content Marketing Institute, people want content they can read. This means simple terms, short sentences, short paragraphs, subheadings, lists, and graphics. You do not need statistics or examples to understand this, because you surely prefer readable content as well.
Just imagine browsing the web for some information you need. You find a promising article, and you want to read it. However, it contains endless phrases, technical terms, and long paragraphs. If you’re in a noisy place, or you need to pay attention to what is going on around you, chances are you’ll never be able to follow and understand those long phrases.
Now imagine reading an article like this one, with sentences that rarely exceed one line, paragraphs between three and five lines, and subheadings. Even if someone interrupts you, it is easy to remember where you left off and continue reading. In fact, you can just scan the text to find out the basics and focus only on the aspects that interest you.
This is precisely what your 2018 content should look like: airy, easy to scan. You already know what to focus on when writing it, but here is a way to make sure you succeed: check your content’s readability. You have two ways to do that: the Yoast SEO plugin or a readability tool.
If you have the Yoast SEO plugin installed on your website, it will analyze and report content readability and give you the green light when everything is alright. With a tool like Readable, all you have to do is paste your content and measure its readability. Unless your target audience consists of scientists, always aim for a high score.
4. Keep up with Technology
You may be conservative by nature, but most of your target audience isn’t. If you want to keep them engaged, you need to stay up to date. This will mean trading the usual graphics you use in your content with ones that stimulate several senses. Your visuals should trigger memories and inspire your audience.
You also need to use the latest communication means. This includes those Facebook lives you hate so much. OK, perhaps you don’t want to do them yourself, but someone should. This basically means communicating with your audience on the same level. They need to know there is a person just like them behind all those labels and price tags.
5. Tell a Story, and Never Stop Learning
In an ever-changing world, your only chance to be successful is to serve a purpose, adapt, and continue to learn. As far as the purpose is concerned, all your posts should be written with a particular message in mind. They should tell and interesting, insightful, and helpful story.
Of course, you shouldn’t expect to get everything perfect, every time. Instead, you should learn from your mistakes, from your audience, and from the best in your field of interest. Learning will allow you to improve as a storyteller, as a marketer, and as a business. How do you learn or from whom?
Think of the content pieces that go viral as things you did right, and the ones that receive the lowest number of visitors as things you did wrong, or mistakes. Your purpose should be to write more pieces similar to those that went viral, and to avoid pieces like those with the lowest traffic.
You can also learn from your audience, from their reactions to your content. Monitor and measure this data to make sure you write more content they treasure and engage with, and less content they may criticize or ignore.
Finally, learn from the best in your line of business. It is up to you to identify them and follow their lead. Just don’t forget that it is one thing to do what they do, and a completely different thing to steal their work.
For example, at Iris Content, we use our website’s traffic data to find out what our audience loves and provide more of it. We use our clients’ feedback to improve our services every day. We also learn from the best marketers, by applying and improving their strategies in such a way as to provide our clients with the best content marketing services for their needs. This way, and following the other 4 tips discussed above, we always succeed to increase our clients’ customer databases.
Are you worried you won’t be able to accomplish your 2018 New Year’s resolution and grow your customer base? You don’t have to do it alone. Contact us now and let us help you! Together, we can put together an infallible content marketing campaign based on the above steps and obtain results in no time!
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Annie has 20 years of experience as an editor and content creator and manager. With work in television and written media, she has dedicated her past 10 years to learning the ropes of online content creation, from writing to editing, from SEO to content management.
If you need a professional to handle all your content during the hectic festive season, Iris Content is launching a few holiday packages that you can take advantage of. Reach out to us and we will help your business shine this holiday season!
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Yes, I want to learn more about content marketing! I want to incorporate the latest marketing strategies to improve my brand, reach a wider audience and sell more stuff!
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