Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While content marketing may be just one part of a larger marketing strategy, it is clear that those businesses with the strongest content strategy have a huge advantage over competitors. If you want to be among the content elite, you cannot just write a blog post here and there, hoping something will get noticed.

You need a well-developed strategy for content that effectively catches attention and meets the needs of your audience.

Maybe you have a new business and haven’t yet started producing content. Or, maybe you’re already turning out content, but it just isn’t getting the response you want. Either way, what you need is a targeted strategy for creating and disseminating great content.

To help you on the road to getting noticed for your content, here’s a list of strategy points that you can use and adapt to your specific needs....

An announcement late last week by the Facebook media team may have been overlooked by many marketers, but it has intriguing ramifications.

Facebook announced that it would effectively allow any organization with a verified page to publish brand-sponsored content without asking Facebook for explicit permission first, provided that content was tagged to the brand. They said:

"Today we're updating our branded content policy to enable verified Pages to share branded content on Facebook. Along with changes to our branded content policy and ads policy, we're offering a new tool that makes it easy for publishers and influencers to tag a marketer when they publish branded content. Publishers and influencers must use this tag for all branded content shared on Facebook."

What does it mean?...

When it comes to social sharing of Internet content, all the action is about cats, fail videos and anything humorous or titillating, right?

Not so. According to a report in The Atlantic, content curator Upworthy publishes far less content than competitor Buzzfeed, yet gets as much as 12x more content shares, per content asset.

What’s the editorial difference between the two? Buzzfeed is generically about news and entertainment; Upworthy draws attention to things that matter or that are meaningful, mentioning women’s issues, health, climate change and Net Neutrality as just a few examples.

What Upworthy has tapped into is that content that matters is as share-worthy, if not moreso, than content that is simply humorous or titillating. Additionally, a study by Contently has shown that knowledge-based verbs such as know, understand, believe, prove and thinkwere prevalent in headlines of highly shared content.

A key takeaway is that content that informs, enlightens, inspires or teaches is content that matters enough to people that they want to share it with friends, family and coworkers....

With 73% of organisations having someone in place to oversee their content strategy and 60% of marketers putting out content at least once a week, the competition to get noticed is fierce. Not only that, but regularly making enough original, engaging content can become a test that nearly half of marketers struggle with.

It’s not good enough to churn out any old posts, if people see you putting out too much half-hearted “me too” content then your reputation will plummet and they won’t visit you again. Creating quality blog posts, videos, Tweets, Pins, pictures and eBooks all starts with good ideas. Although we can’t produce your content for you, we can help with inspiration. Here’s 33 content prompts that can help get your creative juices flowing:...