By Marcus Ho

Every great product or brand starts with an idea. But how does an idea grow into a big idea that stops your audience in their tracks? 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of producing content without a clear idea behind your content strategy. If your organic traffic isn’t growing month over month, or if you find yourself continually spending advertising budget to acquire readers, this probably means that your content strategy lacks a big idea.

If your organic traffic isn’t growing month over month, or if you find yourself continually spending advertising budget to acquire readers, this probably means that your content strategy lacks a big idea. Click To Tweet

Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy famously said: 

You will never win fame and fortune unless you invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

David Ogilvy was absolutely right.

Which book has a better big idea: Rich Dad Poor Dad or 101 Ways to Find the Money to Save and Invest?

Take a look at these two financial self-help books, for instance. Both books teach the principles of saving and investing money. But, can you guess which title sold more copies?

Rich Dad Poor Dad is an international bestseller, yet 101 Ways to Find the Money to Save and Invest is mostly unknown. As we further explore the concept of the big idea, it will quickly become apparent that Rich Dad Poor Dad has a big idea behind it. This is because a title like Rich Dad Poor Dad stands out from all other books about saving and investing. The big idea behind this book has easily cut through the noise and captured any potential readers’ attention.

Let’s delve deeper and explore how you can develop a big idea that works and leads to exponential growth in organic traffic: the ultimate goal for many businesses.

How do you create your big idea for content marketing?

At this stage, you may be wondering where creating your “big idea” fits in your inbound marketing strategy? The answer is it’s the crucial first step in your inbound and content marketing planning process.

If you’re already part way through your content marketing strategy but don’t yet have a big idea in place, don’t panic: this is the time to audit your approach.

1. First, you need to take a step back and consider your buyer persona. Think about the customer you’re trying to reach. Ask yourself:

• Who is your target customer?
• How do they go from awareness to decision?
• What do they want to see?

2. Next, you need to attract your target customer’s interest. One way to do this is to apply the concept of creating unfamiliarity into what they’re already familiar with, or vice versa.

Here’s an example of introducing familiarity with what may seem unfamiliar to your audience: cryptocurrency. Most people have a sketchy understanding of what Bitcoin is. But if one were to explain Bitcoin as a form of “digital gold,” most people would be able to grasp that concept easily since ‘digital’ and ‘gold’ are things that people are already familiar with.

An example of creating unfamiliarity into what people are familiar with would be the wildly successful product, Tangle Teezer, the de-tangling hairbrush. Everyone is familiar with a hairbrush. But a hairbrush that specializes in de-tangling your hair? That’s a novel idea!

Tangle Teezer’s brand success started with a big idea, and inbound traffic grew organically. This product very effectively fulfills its promise to quickly and painlessly de-tangle hair, and customers promptly told their friends. Tangle Teezer became a self-promoting brand.

As you move further through the process of finding your big idea, a memorable and straightforward method is to follow the acronym of B-I-G.

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B: Buzzworthy

Ask yourself: does your idea capture people’s attention?

Talk about your big idea to your friends and colleagues. Are they interested? Do they want to find out more? Ask your colleagues and carefully watch their reaction. Is this an idea that you want to talk about with your friends? Also, consider if there are any market trends that you can leverage to create a content strategy around.

I: Incomparability

As a company or brand, you must stand out from your competitors and create a product that solves a problem.  There are three ways to do this:

1. Genuine Incomparability. Your products are truly unique. Most of us, unfortunately, don’t fall into this category as this requires inventing a product with an exclusive patent. For most products and brands, the next two strategies are more realistic.

2. Industrial Incomparability. You create your big idea around something that your industry competitors may already be doing, but they don’t talk about it in their content strategy. 

Let’s take TOMS shoes as an example. For every pair of TOMS shoes sold, another pair is gifted to a person in need, and customers are made aware of their contribution. Customers feel good about their purchase, and TOMS stands out in a hugely competitive market.

3. Created Incomparability. This is the key to coming up with a big idea that works. You need to find something exciting and compelling about your product to help it stand apart from competitors.

Imagine you work for a company selling health supplements for children, and you need to market vitamin D supplements. If you only list the benefits of vitamin D, most of your audiences will quickly lose attention — especially kids!  To grow your organic inbound traffic and increase product awareness, you need to think differently about your product.

Perhaps as you carry out some research on vitamin D, you discover that astronauts used it during space missions. Suddenly, vitamin D could potentially become the “Astronaut’s Vitamin”. Kids are fascinated by astronauts and intrigued by your product. And parents have the option to purchase an attractive health supplement that their children are excited to take. 

You’re not selling anything different, but you’ve found a creative way to make your product seem unique.

G: Gargantuan Goal

And now we come to your Gargantuan Goal. Ask yourself one simple question: what is the biggest problem you’re trying to solve for your audience?

It’s time to revisit your buyer persona and think about what triggered their customer journey. 

Let’s go back to the Tangle Teezer hairbrush. Its gargantuan goal is simply to provide a solution to the annoying problem of trying to de-tangle your hair. It solves its buyer persona’s biggest problem.

An Example of a Company with an Awesome B-I-G Idea: FrogTape

Finally, let’s look at a brand that successfully demonstrates the B-I-G acronym in action: the painting tape brand, FrogTape.

FrogTape’s content marketing focuses on its ability to achieve clean, sharp lines with no paint bleed. It creates the concept of PaintBlock Technology. PaintBlock Technology is buzzworthy — it immediately intrigues people. They want to find out more. FrogTape effectively inserts the unfamiliar into the familiar.

FrogTape shares painting tips, how-tos, and inspiration as part of their content marketing.

FrogTape also successfully harnesses “Created Incomparability”. It creates the idea of PaintBlock Technology to keep your paint lines straight and sharp. 

FrogTape’s “Gargantuan Goal” is to convince its customers to use FrogTape to create clean lines and avoid the worst-case-scenario of having to repaint a room.

Every aspect of FrogTape’s content marketing strategy then links back to this big idea. Even the design trends on FrogTape’s website have subtle relevance to the big idea: their “Paint Block” technology. 

Get your big idea right, and you’re ready to soar.

Your big idea is the beating heart of your product or brand. Every piece of content you create about your product has to link back to your big idea. It can be subtle, but it has to be there.

By Marcus Ho

Marcus Ho is the founder of the digital and content marketing agency, Brew Interactive. The agency specializes in working with financial and real estate brands to leverage content strategies that will drive their business goals. He is also the author of the highly-rated book, Social Payoff

Sourced from CONVINCE&CONVERT

By Angel Lawrynkiewicz 

Content marketing, if used wisely, can be extremely beneficial to your digital marketing strategy. But, with the Content Marketing Institute reporting that 92% of marketers view content as a business asset, it can be competitive. However, just because almost everyone in the industry is doing it, doesn’t mean that you should sit back and let your competitors take the reign. In 2018, virtually no business can stand to neglect the value of content. If you’re having issues with your content, or just not seeing results, you may be making a rookie mistake.

Here are five reasons why your current content marketing strategy may not be working, and how you can turn it around to better achieve your goals.

 

Many marketers believe that the whole point of content marketing is to convince your audience to buy your product or service, but that isn’t entirely true. Rather than treating your reader as just another sale, you should build a relationship with them by providing informative and engaging content.

By answering the readers’ questions and problems, you will gain their trust which will hopefully persuade them to make a purchase from you in the long-run. Read your content over and make sure that it’s written with the customer in mind, and that you sound like a human rather than a typed commercial.

You can’t write for your target audience if you don’t know who your target audience is. Marketers sometimes think the vaguer their content is, the broader the audience they’ll reach. However, when it comes to content, quality trumps quantity. Instead of throwing up mediocre content on your blog hoping to reach a large number of people, focus on narrowing in on who your potential customers are and what they’re interested in.

Take a look at your current customer base, and identify their demographics and interests. Head over to your competitors’ sites and scope out who they’re targeting. Once you have an idea of who your content is speaking to, you can start brainstorming what topics they’d like to read about and developing a voice that resonates with them.

No matter what industry you’re in, there’s a good chance that you’re up against some tough competitors. But that doesn’t mean you should just throw in the towel and not even bother with content marketing; it just means that you have to think outside the box a little. Do you know how many business funding lenders have blogged on the topic of “What is a business loan?” It’s been written to death. That’s why in addition to the common evergreen topics, my employer Fast Capital 360 makes an effort to cover unique subjects such as “What You Can Learn From Scott Foster and the Chicago Steel” and “How Culture Creates Championship Organizations.”

Think about it – if you’re only addressing cautious matters in your content, what is going to make you stand out from your competitors who have all essentially written the same post as you? Some may argue “Well, my industry isn’t very exciting,” but that isn’t an excuse. Think about different angles you can use to approach your content, and brainstorm with others in the office to develop exciting new blog ideas.

If you’re one of those marketers who merely publishes a piece of content to your site and calls it a day, you really need to break that habit. Writing the content and publishing it is only half the battle. Unless you already have a strong following on your company’s blog, there’s no way that you’re going to attract readers without putting in an effort to promote it.

Have a company newsletter? Great, include your latest blog piece in the next email. On social media? Head over to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and give that article a share. Take advantage of any possible way that can get your content out there and in front of your target audience.

Speaking of getting in front of an audience, you don’t want to forget about optimizing for search when it comes to writing and publishing content. What many don’t realize is that SEO and content go hand-in-hand. Sure, having a company blog is great, but SEO gives it that extra push so that readers can actually find it.

Utilize a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner to conduct keyword research, and include those keywords naturally throughout your content to help people find it. Do you post your content on a self-hosted WordPress site? Download a plugin dedicated to SEO, such as Yoast. This will help you properly optimize your meta descriptions and titles, which in turn will help provide search engines a better idea of what the content is about.

Conclusion

Content is a valuable asset that should be in every marketer’s toolbox. However, there is a right and a wrong way to implement content marketing. It requires more effort than just publishing an article on your blog and hoping for the best. If you’re making any of these mistakes mentioned above, utilize the content marketing tools provided so that your digital marketing strategy can reap the benefits it has to offer.

By Angel Lawrynkiewicz 

Angel is a Digital Marketer at Fast Capital 360.
Fast Capital 360 gives you the alternative financing that functions like an online business loans in days, not weeks or months. We’ve built our business funding company around the idea that you shouldn’t have to wait for the banks to… View full profile ›

Sourced from Business 2 Community