I believe that we’ve all heard about the importance of creating meaningful content. Or how storytelling content is so important to draw more engagement from your audience. How does it really work?
Just like some of my clients, you might have these challenges too;
“I know I need to create meaningful content, but my product seems to be limiting my options to be meaningful.”
“Why don’t we just tell them about our product and the specs? Isn’t that what we want to sell?”
“I see some example of the meaningful content, but I just don’t see how it can bring value and persuade them to buy from us?”
So today, I’m going to highlight 3 tips on how you can easily create meaningful content for your brand.
#1 Stop thinking about monetising, start providing value instead.
But, but… isn’t the main objective of a business to earn money? Absolutely. But again, before you expect the cash flow to come in; you need to first establish a relationship with your potential clients.
Question. Let’s say you’re conducting an online business for selling backpacks. How can you create meaningful content and value to your customers?
Well, there are many angles that you can pitch on. To start with, it’s not wise to pitch via the price at the beginning stage of your journey. Since pricing is often determined by the value that your client can resonate with, the benefit they’ll enjoy and also the quality of the relationship that you’re building, it will not be a great idea to start from that perspective.
You can start by sectioning the benefit of your backpack. Something like – ergonomics of the backpack, the material is water resistance, fitting nicely to the modern lifestyle, the heavy-duty load the backpack can sustain, the occasion that can be used for, testimonials, your service/warranty superiority and so on.
The reason for sectioning out the benefits is to help you to plan your content creation ahead. Too often I see brands just put every single benefit into a content. This is a huge drawback because you’re using all your arsenal in the early stage of a gunfight. A good content strategy is to prolong the audience’s curiosity as if this is a marathon rather than a sprint.
You need to keep your content interesting and fresh long enough to acquire the trust of your audience.
#2 Use the right tone
This is a very important point for you to take note if you’re like me, always skipping all ads that are pushy and ‘sales-ish’. Typically those, “buy one, free one”, “get this for a limited time offer”, “why our product is awesome, blah blah blah…”
I’m not saying that this approach isn’t good but if it is too frequent, people might go bored and skip you altogether. You need to use this approach or tone at a certain moment only, not all the time. Some brands are making these sort of ads run almost throughout the year and this is absolutely annoying when you somehow can’t avoid seeing them a dozen times a day.
Instead, use the right tone to engage your audience. Avoid sounding like a broken record that keeps telling them how great your product is. Despite having the same underlying message, your content needs to be highlighted via multiple angles.
Let’s use the backpack product again as the storyline. In this situation, we might want to let them know about how this backpack can protect the back of the body even if it has a heavy load. You can share content such as articles, infographics or video related to the study made about the importance of protecting your back.
Then you can probably chip in the results, fast facts or technology being incorporated into this backpack. Making it comfortable to carry even after long hours. You can also use engaging photos of someone hiking using your backpack, perhaps spicing it up a little with a simple quote alongside it. You may also work on a short testimony video too. This idea behind creating these contents is to create brand awareness.
Direct selling turns people off.
Consumers these days typically buy things for several reasons. It could be because it is well known or popular, stylish, a symbolic of class, peer pressure, usability or simply due to its pricing.
#3 Use less text and more visuals, please.
We are living in an age where most of our information is consumed via smart devices.
In 2018, an average user spends more than 5 hours browsing content on their smartphones. And I believe that the hours will increase even more in years to come.
With the limitation of the screen size of the smart devices, content oversupply and short attention span on social media, one of the best ways to attract attention is through attractive visuals.
Take a look at the above illustrations that appear on my Instagram feed.
The enlightvideoleap (left) shows a short 30-seconds clip on how their mobile app works while slideforest (right) shows you their minimalist powerpoint slides.
These are visuals oriented content. If presented correctly, your audience will definitely stop scrolling and take a peek at it for sure. If you’re looking for a phone app to help you with mobile editing, stumbling on the left video advertisement works like a charm. No text needed. Whereas the ads on the right use limited words and a larger area of white space to create a minimalist look which ties to their selling point.
Remember, try not to clutter the visual with so many things inside. Let the visual speaks for itself, you can add short text on the description such as Check out our creators’ package, links on bio, and that is it. Short but sweet.
A study has shown that the average attention span of a human being is ONLY 8 seconds. That said, tons of text will NOT help your marketing effort at all.
Bonus; #4 Be consistent!
Awesome brand awareness is not just about getting the right ads in the right places. You need organic interaction with your audience as well. We call it Social Authority. The more interaction people see at your brand’s social media page, the more people will attract to it. When this happens, you can eventually speed up the trust building processes for conversion purposes.
That is why, aside from creating ads, you need to constantly create content to get your audience to come and engage.
Epidemic Sound is a page that I follow because I use their music for my vlogs. And as you can see from their page, they share content on how others can use their music in production by directing the audience to their blog. This is brilliant. A constant flow of resourceful information will smoothen up your audience to stay engaged long-term.
Don’t give your audience the chance to leave and source out another site for information, make them stay. The only way to do this is to consistently create your own authentic content.
It doesn’t have to be daily, but it is recommended for you to create such contents on a regular basis and as frequent as possible. Think of it, it’s just 52 contents in total for a year if you wish to do it weekly. If you plan your content ahead you can definitely nail it.
There are tons of things that you can share, from good tips, how-to, tutorials, fast facts, user experience to trends, production process and many more. The key to organic engagement is not to think too hard. Just be authentic, just be yourself. We’ve seen too much ‘perfect visual posts’ on social media yet the engagement is rather average if not low. The best is to post something real, something authentic and something humane, then you’ll see how the engagement will skyrocket.
At times, a selfie might help too.
There you go, three simple tips plus one bonus tip on how to create meaningful content. Every brand has its own niche. You need to keep on experimenting until you find the right formula for success.
