How to Stand Out In Content Marketing

Posted by Michael Leander 12 Min Read

Is developing a great product or providing excellent customer service enough to stand out in a competitive business landscape?

No.

Today, you must cultivate a relationship with your audience. You must address their problems and answer their questions whenever necessary.

To be successful in today’s ever-changing business environment, you must have a solid content marketing strategy.

With this, you can prove to your customers why and how they should purchase your products, and not those from competitors.

It’s through your content that you can expound more about what you have to offer.

Whether you’re marketing for ordinary businesses or are looking for the most effective B2B marketing strategies, having solid content marketing is always one of the most effective techniques to apply.

In this guide, you will discover five simple content marketing tips to stand out in a sea of competitors.

Research High-Value Topics

Creating content that your audience finds valuable and engaging will help you gain their attention, and eventually, their trust.

By creating or choosing the right content to produce and distribute, you can drive traffic, improve brand awareness, and boost sales.

Remember to choose topics that are relevant. Otherwise, they’ll have no meaning to your current audience and even to your target market.

Here are a few ideas for your research endeavors:

  • Look for topics that your audience is interested in
  • Find topics with less competition
  • Select topics that perform well on various networks
  • Pick old content that you can repurpose

Think of your audience’s pain points, ones which you can address through your content. Then list all the topics you can think of.

From there, you can start researching on each topic. Check out its search volume, as well as its value. Data has an extreme value in this process, and that’s why we created a guide on the importance of data in content marketing.

Let’s use a specific example. Let’s say you sell bicycles. There are several ways you can research and generate topics for your content:

  • Questions customers ask about your bicycles, including questions directed to customer support. Content ideas arising from this research could include brake maintenance, what to do if you get a flat tire, or best accessories for your bicycle.
  • Think of topics that would interest customers who like cycling, such as travel itineraries for cycling trips, best cycling trails or top workouts for cyclists.
  • Use a tool like ContentGenie, which can generate ideas for you. For $50, you can get 10 topics generated by the “Genie,” which searches for related keywords for your topic and calculates the competition & trends.

Remember these three simple steps when you’re doing your research:

  • Collect your data: Using your preferred keyword marketing tool, determine whether each topic you listed is relevant and valuable. You can do that by identifying the number of people who find the topic or keywords useful or important. Also, find out if other competitors are writing about the topics on your list as well.
  • Pick your priorities: On a spreadsheet, enter all the data you’ve gathered. From there, you can easily determine which topics you wish to prioritize. As mentioned, you can work on topics with high potential reach. You may also select the ones with less competition.
  • Narrow down your list: Think of your overall marketing strategy. What do you intend to achieve through your content? Once you have your answer, you can remove items from the list that you believe won’t help achieve your goal.

Establish a Unique Voice

Having a clear, defined brand voice lets you stand out in highly saturated markets. It encourages consumers to pick your business over the competition.

Here are a few questions to help you determine your brand voice:

  • What are your core brand values?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • Think of your brand as a person: what would it be like to hang out with him or her?
  • How does your brand relate to your audience?

Dollar Shave Club was once a small startup that blew to epic proportions after they dropped their first marketing video, which showcased their playful and witty personality.

Within 90 days of uploading their content, they racked up around 5 million views.

Great storytelling was crucial to their success.

They also had more room to establish a well-defined voice as they took advantage of video content, which is now more popular than it was seven years ago.

What’s more, they knew exactly how to reach out to their audience.

Your brand voice can change depending on your target audience, products, as well as your marketing tactics.

As your business continues to evolve, your brand voice can evolve with it. In an ever-changing landscape, you must be ready to reshape your brand whenever necessary.

Engage Your Audience

Publishing high-value content won’t be enough to keep your audience interested.

To retain their attention, you must nurture a relationship with your audience.

Take the time to reach out to the people who follow your brand, and engage them in discussions.

Here’s what you need to do:

  • Put your audience first: As already mentioned, you must create content that your audience will find relevant and valuable. It should address their problems and contain actionable insights.
  • Use social media: Sharing your content on your preferred social media platforms enables you to interact with your audience in real-time. Reaching out to your audience through these channels lets you address any pressing issues, answer their questions, and get to know them more.
  • Add a call-to-action: Whether you do videos or blogs, adding a call-to-action to your content lets you start conversations with your audience. For instance, you can invite them to submit questions, or at the very least, react to your content.

Promote User-Generated Content

A simple way to keep content fresh and exciting is to promote user-generated content. Think of it as digital word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s an excellent way to turn prospective consumers into paying customers. Better yet, it’s free.

Sharing your consumers’ experience with your products or services on your online channels can influence the purchasing decisions of many prospects. In doing so, you can engage with your audience and make them feel appreciated and more connected to your brand.

Consumers trust user-generated content because it’s authentic and credible. According to Photoslurp, user-generated photos are five times more likely to generate a conversion compared to professional content.

Here are other stats you might want to know about:

GoPro has arguably the best user-generated content marketing strategy today. For that reason, GoPro is one of the most recognizable brands around the world.

Using their audience’s content for advertisement has allowed them to gain the attention of a generation that loves travel and values experiences over material possessions.

Always ask permission from other creators before using their content to promote your brand and your products.

Choose the Right Social Media Channels

Whether you run an online business or a traditional brick-and-mortar store, social media is critical to your business’ success.

There’s a ton of platforms out there, but only a few networks are vital to business.

The population on social media platforms are increasing by the day, so this is something you shouldn’t take for granted.

Otherwise, you’re losing a wide audience reach already at your fingertips.

There’s a ton of platforms out there, but only a few networks are vital to business. Here are five of the most popular platforms today:

  • Facebook. Since the platform has a massive and diverse audience, it’s the perfect place to share your content. Facebook is ideal for businesses whose target audience are aged 25-34, as it’s the largest demographic on the platform.
  • With Facebook, you also have more leeway to expound on your text through wall posts. Here you can play around with longer text compared to Instagram and Twitter, for instance.

Here are other key tips for content marketing on Facebook:

  • Always have a content calendar for better structure and scheduling of your posts
  • Sign up for a My Business account on Facebook
  • Optimize your profile page
  • Link your Facebook page to your other social media accounts
  • Instagram. People aged 18-29 are the largest demographic on the network, which is perfect for creative brands aiming to reach consumers under 30.
  • YouTube. This is the go-to platform for video content. With YouTube, you can reach your target audiences as well as earn revenue from your content.
  • Twitter. Any business will benefit from starting a Twitter channel, as it allows them to provide their audience with excellent customer support.
  • LinkedIn. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is your best shot at gaining the attention of professionals and industry leaders worldwide. It works perfectly when you set up your interests correctly and learn how to use LinkedIn ads.

While these social media platforms do have built-in analytics, it’s even better to use more sophisticated tools like Pyramid Analytics to measure your content’s impact and determine how you should improve.

That way, you can also study periodically whether or not the content marketing strategies you’ve applied on each platform are effective.

Final word

Don’t waste all the effort you’ve made by having no audience you can engage with, especially when it’s through your content that you can give out information about your products and services.

While content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies there is, it can still be a challenge to make it successful.

You need to do everything that you can to stand out, and these tips above are a great start.