We live in a very noisy world. Each day there are 4.75 billion pieces of content shared, 55 million Facebook posts, 500 million tweets, and 700 million snapchats. It is in this context in which associations are attempting to break through the clutter, get noticed, engage with members, and build relationships. It is a crowded, noisy landscape, which is only getting noisier. How can your association stand out in this complex and loud world?
I recently had the opportunity to represent AH and attend ASAE’s 2015 Marketing, Membership and Communication Conference (MM&C) in Washington DC. MM&C’s general session, presented by Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, shared a secret formula to overcome the obstacles of communicating effectivity in this tech-savvy world.
While there’s no single road to more effective content marketing, several guidelines can help associations navigate the journey, Handley said. She recommended three key steps as the secret formula:
- Focus on empathy and experiences
- Focus on relevant and inspired stories
- Focus on useful information
Now that you’ve tasted the secret sauce, how do you incorporate those elements into creating something wonderful? Handley outlined five tactics that the most effective organizations are implementing in their content marketing efforts.
- Start with Strategy: Great content doesn’t come about randomly. Organizations determine the bigger story that they want to tell and they set a plan. Determine why you are creating a piece of content. Why should we do this? Who are we trying to reach? What value will we deliver to them? When and how should we use this content? Where will we deliver it? Great content is highly strategic and planned.
- Focus on Audience: Know who your audience is and what you want your audience to do. Follow the rule of FIWTSBS: Find interesting ways to say boring stuff. “There’s a huge missed opportunity in not thinking about things on an ‘About Us’ page or your landing pages or your calls to action,” Handley said. Those are places your members and audience go to learn more about you, so make it interesting.
- Be Irresistibly Useful: Provide information that your target audience strongly needs. What information do they need to live their lives better, do their jobs better, connect better, and grow?
- Tell Stories via Social Media: Don’t just share your content on social media, but use those tools to tell stories. Look at social media as a vehicle to tell relevant, impactful stories.
- Create a Unique Voice with Good Writing: The most effective content marketers have a unique tone of voice and strong writing skills. Get inside the heads of your audience so you can figure out what they need and care about.
