How to Make Your Content Marketing More Memorable
We are overexposed to digital content, a reason why a lot of it slips out of our mind like water off a duck’s back. Content marketers today face the challenge of creating memorable content that can earn them an active, returning social media community, newsletter subscribers, and loyal customers.
Late in catching the content marketing bus? Chances are your content will be compared against that already familiar to your audience. The challenge here will be to capture your audience’s interest, or at least appear as trustworthy as established content marketers. Here is a look at some ways in which you can enhance your content and build momentum to your blog and social media pages.
1. Invest in Visuals, Visuals and More Visuals
The human mind pays more attention to visual information.
Eye-tracking studies show that internet readers are partial to information-carrying images. When relevant images are used, readers spend more time looking at them than they do reading text on the page.
When people hear information, they’re likely to recall only 10% of it three days later. But if a relevant image accompanies the information, they are able to retain 65% of it after a span of three days.
One way, and the easiest, is to simply pair your blog post or textual information with relevant, high-quality images that stick. If you only plan to use free stock photos, be prepared to spend some time looking at a few dozen images in order to pick out a few good ones to use. Will this guarantee high memorability? Maybe not, if your blog readers or social media audience find more compelling photos or infographics on a different website.
For a better chance of staying in their minds, you want to get creative about your images. That is, create and curate visuals based on your ability or that of your team, as well as the time you can afford to spend on this task. These tools should make your job easier and pleasurable:
– Canva, ideal for non-designers, offering pre-designed templates and a simple interface
– Ease.ly for data-backed graphics using a variety of visual, editable themes
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– Infogr.am to create infographics, charts and maps
– Simple Diagrams to create different types of visualization, including diagrams and sketches
– Online image editors PicMonkey.com, Pixlr.com and iPiccy.com
Recommended reading: The Ultimate List of Photo Editor and Graphic Design Apps
As visuals help people process information quickly, you can also use images to explain your product on social media. The alternative is to create a product video, which consumers have been seen to prefer over reading text, and prompted content marketers to increase their investment in video marketing.
2. Push Out Useful Content Consistently to Customers and Prospects
If you have been following Indian Premier League (IPL) matches even on and off, you would have definitely watched a well-choreographed smartphone advertisement featuring a popular Bollywood actor and a lilting rhythm, every couple of minutes. While the ad can get annoying after a point as it is played a bit too frequently, it moves into the realm of ‘unforgettable’, even playing in your head and reminding you of the smartphone’s selfie-taking prowess.
Can your content start becoming memorable if people are exposed to it on a regular basis? Yes, especially when it comes to existing customers.
First focus on people who have bought your product, wooing them with free content in the form of newsletters, webinars and reports. The more consistent you are, the greater the likelihood of gaining a captive audience that now trusts you as a reliable source of content keeping them up-to-date with industry developments or entertaining them or introducing them to new hacks or fulfilling some other important need.
A second group of people to target is your prospects, those who are aware of your brand and even engage with your social media page and blog, but who can also quite easily switch over to a more marketing savvy competitor. To be memorable among your prospects, once again you can consider reaching out to them with timely, interesting and useful content on your blog, social media pages, and website. Give them a chance or a couple of chances to subscribe to your email newsletter – a thoughtfully-planned email marketing campaign can get you the buy-in you want.
Tease prospects with content tidbits and the assurance of free weekly or bi-weekly reports/newsletters containing meaningful, well-presented content. Once they start consuming your posts, images, reports and infographics, what you say will stick better and bind them to your brand.
3. Appeal to Readers’ Emotions
Emotionally charged advertisements have a powerful impact on us. The most commonly used emotions in advertising are : happiness (feel-good factor), anger (political ads use it to good effect), disgust (popularly used to sell medication, skincare and weight-loss products), sadness (social awareness ads), fear (public service, anti-smoking ads), and surprise (usually incorporated with other emotions).
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Explore ways to apply these emotions to build a context around your content.
- Plug-in a customer story
- State your own observations on a topic and invite discussions
- Share the experience of your staff in tackling a challenging issue
- Show your audience something they are unlikely to have seen before
- Choose a topic around which a lot of uncertainty still exists
- Shine the spotlight on a recent community development initiative
Brainstorm with your content team to discover new, exciting topics to talk about or consider developing a short campaign during an important time of the year – a major sporting event, political elections, an extremely popular TV series/video game, based on relevancy and your audience’s interests as revealed by customer and social media analytics. Create content exclusively around a focused theme for a short duration of time. By joining in the most popular conversation/discussion topics among your audience during these pivotal occasions, your social media content can appear ‘spot-on’ and enhance your memorability.
Image credit : Kate Mangostar via Freepik.com
