Give Your Content a Glamour Shot - Part I
If you know anything about the early 90s (or you’ve seen the film Napoleon Dynamite), you’re probably familiar with “Glamour Shots®”. In hindsight they’re considerably cheesy as most photos from that era feature fuzzy lighting, weirdly inappropriate ensembles and lots of hairspray but at the time it was a way for regular people to get a flattering, professional headshot at the mall and have their time in the spotlight.
So the other day when I was thinking about content, I thought about glamour shots. It struck me that good content doesn’t really cut it without getting its “glamour shot” on. Giving your content a “glamour shot” will help boost it out of that awful place where content goes to die. SiriusDecisions data tells us that 60-70% of B2B content goes unused, lets give it the life it deserves!
Here are five ways I’ve given my content “glamour shots” that have worked wonders:
One piece of content, many angles. Just like a photographer will try multiple angles to get the perfect shot, always try different angles to drive traffic to the content on your blog or website. Say you’ve just commissioned a piece of long form content. Just slapping your content out on a website with a blog that’s somewhat of an afterthought won’t quite cut it. You need to create SEO strategized blog titles, and if possible create multiple blogs where you can pull out different parts of the content based on topic. Doing this is a great way to see what the most popular part of your content is and what keywords and what topics drove people to it.
Name drop. Get a legitimate journalist or industry expert, preferably someone who has a strong following on social media, to create your content. This isn’t easy and you will get turned down quite a bit. Often journalists would prefer to work for a magazine of course, and that makes sense. They’re going to get a lot more prestige writing for The Atlantic than you unless you’re Microsoft. However, as content marketing’s popularity grows, the lines between B2B and journalism will be changing, and I predict writers will become more accessible.
Boring is bad. So the content you’ve commissioned is done, you read it and find yourself very, very bored. I have something to tell you, if it is boring to you, it’s probably boring to the readers you’re trying to reach, I don’t care how smart they are. Make sure you or the writer insert both excitement about the topic and a sense of humor (if appropriate of course) to keep readers engaged.
Your job with the content doesn’t begin with promotion. You should be figuring out what your audience is interested in and come up with cool ideas to share with the writer before you commission the content. And it’s possible you or someone on your team has contacts to use for interviews and expert information, so help the writer out when at all possible.
Think about shareability BEFORE the content is created, not after; communicate this to the writer. When you’re reading the finished product, you should see as many as twenty Tweet-worthy snippets in the content. What are Tweet-worthy snippets? Anything that’s breaking industry news, interesting quotes or anecdotes, statistics, and exclusive company case study information. If the people you’re commissioning write content for you and are not getting this for you, find someone else. Your commissioned content has great ideas but no stats? I often use this trick - if you don’t have actual stats in the content, research some online and boost the content that way. Tweets with stats typically get way more impressions and shares than quotes, so the time investment on your end is worth it.
Conclusion
The idea to give every piece of content I’m involved with its own “Glamour Shot” came from several years of experience – and it works. I’ve learned the hard way - I have created content that’s gone nowhere, and I’ve seen others’ content that’s sat unused for months. Utilizing these five tips as part of your content creation plan will ensure that your next eBook, white paper or infographic does not end up in a content graveyard!
If you would like to hear more from Leah Kinthaert on digital marketing tips, tune into the featured topic segment of the CMS-Connected Show aired on May 31st as she gave us her contemporary ideas from a marketing perspective on the digital transformation which cuts across every aspect of how companies must engage externally and operate internally.
Leah Kinthaert
Leah is a Demand Generation Expert with 10 years of B2C and B2B marketing experience and is currently a Digital Transformation Lead at Informa. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Mobilengine where she managed content strategy, curation, and editorial to deliver creative, intelligent, and relevant content for their website and all social channels. Prior to Mobilengine, she was the Acquisition Marketing Manager at InsuraMatch.