🏋️ Elements of a powerful content strategy
🏋️ Elements of a powerful content strategy
Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
Content is still the reigning king of marketing, which means your brand’s content has to pack a powerful punch against the competition.
Today, we have the latest insights and strategies to help your team accomplish just that.
Today’s agenda:
🤔 Rethinking thought leadership
📖 Storytelling techniques to touch your audience
🔮 The real future of content marketing
💼 Briefly — our quick news roundup
⏱️ Up & coming
What thought leadership really can do
In a Semrush survey of over 300 marketers and industry experts, the No. 1 answer to the question “What does thought leadership mean for you?” was “Inspirational content that drives changes.”
But there’s also much more to it than that. There’s a collaborative element, and a sharing of experiences and expertise.
💡 The problem with most thought leadership strategies, according to Content Marketing Institute, is as follows:
Sales reaches out for “thought leadership content” for lead generation without sharing insights into how this content performs or how it connects to the bigger picture
Thought leadership content ends up meeting top-funnel goals, but isn’t able to reach beyond that
Your competition is all doing the same thing
Your buyers “have zero interest in becoming subject matter experts,” says Robert Rose, CMI’s chief strategy advisor
🔑 The key to solving these problems is to determine how thought leadership can fuel each stage of the customer journey — and empower sales to tell better stories that support the customer at each of these stages.
These stories should progress in the following ways:
👉 Why the prospect should change
👉 How they should change
👉 How you can help them change
The other key to improving your thought leadership strategy is to never keep your ideas trapped in one “container,” meaning your ideas should be discussed first, then given the appropriate content type and channel to shine.
How to leverage storytelling in your campaigns
A compelling story moves far beyond sales and into a space where the audience feels deeply connected to your brand — and moved to act.
✍️ Winning storytelling strategies from Entrepreneur:
Transformation story that shows how your services have helped a struggling person find success
Community story that highlights the shared values and experiences within your community
Humorous story that balances lighthearted humor with your message
Storytelling can help your brand stand out with engaging content that emotionally impacts your audience.
🗣️ One of the most powerful ways to leverage storytelling is through client stories or testimonials. Consider the most impactful people you have worked with, and reach out for permission to share their story.
How your brand colors impact your audience
Did you know that up to 80% of “snap judgements” about products are based on color?
🎨 Think: Target red, McDonald’s yellow, Home Depot orange, Starbucks green.
According to HubSpot, different colors evoke various emotions and associations, and consistent colors can significantly boost brand recall.
When choosing your colors, consider:
Your brand’s message, values, and goals
The emotions you want to evoke from the audience
Then, look up color psychology to make sure you’re choosing colors that match the emotions you want your audience to feel.
What content marketing will look like in an AI-driven future
Marketing has undergone significant changes in recent years, thanks to the pandemic, rapidly evolving technology, and, as a subset of the latter: the rise of AI.
🔭 As we all were pulling together our “content marketing predictions for 2023” at the end of last year, not many of us could have predicted how big of a role AI would start to play just a few short months later.
Thankfully, Chad S. White, head of research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, was recently inspired to pen the trends he thinks will drive the next 10 years of content marketing.
His insights:
👉 AI has great long-term promise despite the current controversies, which means that in the coming years, content marketers will have a new goal: to make their content better than anything AI can create. This means more timely content, unique examples, and compelling voices.
👉 Generative AI will affect SEO traffic by providing users with answers directly through ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc. But White believes brands can protect themselves from lost SEO traffic by building their websites to be a “trusted destination” for their audience.
👉 Email marketing will remain as strong as ever as a platform where you are in control of all the data and content distribution. Whereas social media is “rented land,” your website and email content belongs to you.
Briefly
💰 The world’s wealthiest people, including Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison, have seen their fortunes grow by more than $150 billion in 2023 due to the boom of AI-related stocks
🏦 Central banks around the world recently made very different monetary policy decisions involving rate hikes, cuts, and pauses
📻 The world’s first AI DJ has made its on-air debut in Portland, Oregon
🤖 Check out the new AI app that records, transcribes, and summarizes your voice memos
Up & Coming
Reuters' 2023 Digital News Report had some pretty significant — yet unsurprising — findings:
People are growing increasingly dependent on influencers or celebrities for news over traditional journalists
Trust in news sources continues to fall
Public participation in online news is down, and 36% of people avoid reading the news
People prefer algorithmic news feeds over news-selection algorithms
You can find an overview of the report here.