How to create irresistible content

By DeAndre Brown

Content marketing is a great way to get people talking about your products, services, and your company. It’s also a way to engage customers and maybe even create a community.

Irresistible content gets you noticed, prompts people to take action and has many benefits, such as building brand awareness, educating customers, building credibility and authority with target audiences, and driving conversions.

While everybody has the capability to create content, does it prompt action from your target audience? Is it getting the right attention? How do you create irresistible content?

Combine Your Purpose with Your Customer’s Passion

Before creating content, it’s important to think about your organizational purpose, and then think about how this combines with what your customers wants, needs, and values.  

Examples of where purpose meets passion:

  • Southwest – Customers want an easy experience from booking their flight to the customer service and hospitality from the flight attendants. Southwest understands this and makes the user experience easy. Every idea they have resonates with transparency and ease of use. They take every opportunity to reiterate their brand culture in everything they do.
  • Spotify – Customers want to know companies are listening and addressing their concerns. In 2016, Spotify completely crashed. After the crash, Spotify responded immediately across all channels and continues to address the issues in a transparent fashion as they arise. This level of customer service, not to mention the customization and music selection the platform allows, makes Spotify a relevant brand.

But how are these companies able to provide amazing experiences?

Use Audience Insights

It’s important to achieve a connection with your audience. Many people think technology is the blame for disruption–but really, it’s companies not listening to customers. It’s vital to understand the world from the customer’s perspective. This can be accomplished through research.

You can pull research from existing sources, or employ a research company:

  • Internal research – gain insight from the people within your organization that know your customer well.
  • Secondary data – research interviews with people who are similar to the audience in which you are seeking.
  • External research – LinkedIn profiles, analyst and research reports on the industry, competitors’ content, etc.
  • Go to the Source – doing first-person interviews gives you the opportunity to probe people on why the people they perform a specific action.

​Develop Your Customer Profile

When conducting research, attributes like social, economic, and cultural trends, cultural values and anxieties, attitudes, and behaviors help you develop a profile of your customers.

When developing the customer profile, don’t just look at demographics. Instead, consider the following:

  • Description: what’s at stake for this person?
  • Needs and goals: what is my audience trying to achieve on a daily basis?
  • Tech usage, media communication, and influencers: what technology is my audience using and when? Who influences them to make decisions?

After collecting and analyzing your research, document this information in a first-person narrative in order to bring the person reading the persona into the world of the individual, you’re creating content for.

Answering these questions will allow you to better understand your target audience and write irresistible content that is formulated for them. It will show that you’ve kept them in mind during every step of the content development process.

Ready to write some irresistible content and take your content marketing strategy to the next level? Get in touch!

Think of marketing like journalism.

By Brandon Aksteter

Sparked in large part by the 2016 presidential elections, we’ve watched the world spiral into a sea of fake news and cries for authenticity. It’s left many reputed journalists and media outlets in a sudden uphill battle to win back the trust and attention of their readers. Day two of DC Digital Summit 2019 featured keynote speaker Paul Plumeri, VP Global Brand Marketing at the Wall Street Journal, who drew an insightful comparison to a similar battle in the world of marketing.

Just like today’s news readers are trained to quickly question the validity of the news they see reported and shared on social media, audiences have been similarly conditioned to question the authenticity and agenda of even the largest and most trusted brands when confronted with an advertisement. So how do we as marketers win back their trust?

Take the following quotes about journalism for example. By replacing the words “journalism” with “marketing,” “readers” with “consumers,” and “journalists” with “marketers,” we can re-discover the true meaning of our jobs as marketers.

“Journalism Marketing is storytelling with a purpose.

It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important.

It must balance what readers consumers want with what they cannot anticipate but need.”

– American Press Institute

“Quality is measured both by how much work engages its audience and enlightens it.

This means journalists marketers must continually ask what information has the most value

to citizens and in what form people are most likely to assimilate it.”

– American Association of Journalists

Perhaps Paul Plumeri said it best as he ended his presentation: “To market content well, you must become a journalist/editor within your organization. Your beat is your brand, your products, and most importantly, your customers.”