By Neil Patel.

What are you doing to embrace and tackle marketing industry changes? Are you afraid to try new things? Or are you fearless?

One of the reasons I am so passionate about the marketing industry is the anticipation of changes, and ability to experiment with new marketing tactics and efforts.

Taking chances is often what separates top marketing professionals from novices. But how can you separate fads from educated risks? Take a look at the top strategies I’ve identified that most marketers might deem risky, may not be aware of, or not fully understand.

These are risks, yes, but they are risks that are worth taking.

1. Switch from outbound to content marketing

In the past, it was enough to highlight your product or service and the hundreds of fantastic features and capabilities. These days, you have to add value to your brand and product/service with content that teaches and establishes you as a thought leader and an expert. Why should your customers believe in what you’re selling?

It might scare you to switch to an inbound format that teaches and nurtures your prospects. How will they know what you offer, you ask? How will we sell and generate leads without pushing our product? Content marketing can be scary to adopt because it relies on your expertise and puts the ball in your prospects court.

In contrast, content marketing is shown to drive more traffic and leads than outbound marketing. According to Demandmetric content marketing generates as many as three times more leads than outbound marketing.

2. Interactive content

As content marketing rises in popularity, pushing through the clutter is becoming more and more difficult for all of us. But even though we know we must differentiate ourselves from the pack, we can be hesitant to make our basic content more interactive and exciting.

Interactive content can draw more attention to your messaging while increasing your engagement on powerful social media sites. Quizzes, ROI calculators and interactive infographics can help you convey your brand’s story in a more dynamic fashion.

As a bonus, eye-catching, interactive, fun content can draw the attention or industry publications in addition to attracting prospects. As a result, you can extend your reach and continue driving traffic and high quality links to your site and blog.

3. Embrace up-and-coming social media channels

While there remains a place for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, new social media channels will allow you to reach consumers in new and exciting ways. Additionally, new channels allow you to explore more creative methods of telling your stories and conveying who you are.

Snapchat, Instant Articles on Facebook, and Instagram Stories provide companies and even professionals a channel to experiment and target specific groups and audiences. As a bonus, new and exciting social media channels are often a great place to promote the interactive content discussed above.

4. Developing content for real people, not algorithms

As a marketer, you may have gotten in the habit of developing and creating content that will highlight your company, blog, business or ideas at the top of the search engines.

These days you’ve got to step out of your box and think about your content in the context of your reader’s desires, fears, worries and needs.

Creating content that is displayed in front of thousands of sets of eyes is no longer enough to set you apart. Instead, readers expect real ideas that are well written and display complex and interesting ideas and thoughts.

While SEO is still very important, don’t be afraid to put your audience and their needs and wants first and consider your page rank secondarily.

Instead of using keywords to draw more traffic from search engines and their algorithms, use keywords to highlight your points and draw readers in by providing information that is valuable to your audience.

5. Reuse and repurpose your top content

Even your loyal readers may not see your content initially. It could take several touches and multiple channels to get through to them. Try reposting your top blog posts with refreshed titles or new visuals.

Utilize that content in a digest newsletter format to drive traffic to content that your audience’s peers have enjoyed (it can be tough to resist content that we know our peers and colleagues have enjoyed).

Want more traffic? Automate that refreshed and repurposed content for periods when it’s relevant or for different days or times to attract new readers who may not have engaged the first time around.

According to Curata, only 29% of marketers are reusing/repurposing content, which means many marketers are only putting their messaging in front of their audiences one time: they’re missing out on valuable clicks, impressions and engagement.

Conclusion

We’re often afraid of the uncertain. We get stuck doing the same marketing activities over and over again in an effort to remain comfortable. We know our metrics for what we’ve been doing. We have goals for those efforts. We know what to expect.

Getting over our fears is as simple as widening our expectations and being ok with not knowing exactly what to expect from our marketing efforts. Try something new. By taking small steps and measuring your efforts very closely, you might find that your strategies are not enough.

You might try something that doesn’t work or isn’t right for your audience. But more importantly, you might find something that is a clear win and helps you change the course of your marketing efforts, your business and messaging.

What are some “risky” techniques that you may try?

By Neil Patel

I cover entrepreneurship, conversion optimization, marketing and sales

Sourced from Forbes