Let’s face it, there’s a lot of content noise in the world. As marketers, we are constantly looking for great ways for our content to cut through that noise and speak to our respective audiences. As you well know, that’s a tall order. Well, I have good news and bad news! Which do you want first?
The bad news: Nothing can make breaking through the noise easy; it will always be tricky. (That’s OK; nothing truly great comes too easily, right?)
The good news: There are companies and content marketers doing amazing work breaking through, and we can learn so much from them if we pay attention to what they’re doing and saying!
Case in Point, The Content Marketers Guide to Social Media, the most recent whitepaper by Sprinklr. It’s a great read that offers tips for breaking through content noise and some great advice from content marketing heavy weights.
Just how much content noise is there?
Quite a lot.
We all experience the immense content noise every time we go online, and Sprinklr puts in into context by pointing out that every minute of every day there are:
- 1.3M pieces of content shared on Facebook
- 350K new tweets
- 100 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube
- 41K photos posted to Instagram
- 14 gigabytes of data generated on Pinterest
For consumers and B2B customers this means that it can be extremely hard to find the exact information they seek from brands.
For brands this means that it can be beyond tricky to get the right info into the right hands.
There’s a massive amount of content noise for both parties and it is our job as marketers to solve the noise problem for our customers. If we solve their noise problem, we in turn solve our own problem. And we have a lot to gain!
5 tips to cutting though content noise
1 – Identify your audience: Rather than taking a shotgun approach, find a way to hyper-target your desired audience. There are many ways to target, but few more efficient than a social media profiling tool that will help you to find the right audience. If a tool exists, use it to make your life easier!
2 – Determine what your audience needs: Research to better understand what your audience is looking to find. Through use of social listening you can learn what your audience needs, thinks about, likes and dislikes. The more you know about the conversations your customers are having online the better you can tailor your content to meet their needs.
3 – Package your content properly: As you know, all social media networks require different types of communication. The way you communicate on LinkedIn will be drastically different from how you write a tweet or post on Facebook. As such, you need to tailor your messaging based on each network’s specific requirements in order to be effective. As you get to know the subtle nuances of each you’ll learn the most effective tactics.
4 – Identify what content works best: I can’t stress the importance of measurement enough. Always make sure to track your content and pay close attention to what works well, and more importantly, what doesn’t. Use this information to do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
5 – Amplify what works: If you discover you have a piece of content that has outperformed others, use it to your advantage! Chances are your other content is good, but for some reason this one piece stood out amongst all of the content noise. With a small investment in paid media, you can use that piece of content to drive more traffic, ultimately helping you to expose your other content and building a bigger audience.
Tips, tips and more tips from the best in content marketing (and me)
Not only does Sprinklr offer fantastic tips, they also tapped into a list of influential content marketers to get more advice on cutting through content noise to connect with customers.
Any time I have the opportunity to read advice from the likes of Joe Pulizzi, Jason Miller, Michael Brenner, Michael Brito, Pam Didner and others I jump at the chance. You should too.
If you haven’t had the chance yet, I highly recommend that you check out their whitepaper. Did I mention that it even includes a page featuring yours truly? Yes, a very proud moment for this content marketer.
