Some things just naturally go together. Here’s one more combo that belongs in this category: content marketing and copywriting.

Even if marketing content should never directly sell a product, your content marketing campaign can benefit in a big way from the smart use of tried and true copywriting techniques. You can use copywriting to

1. Make your content easier and more pleasant to read (i.e. more appealing to your readers)
2. Help you “market” your content

Here’s how:

Copywriting “Spice” Can Make Your Content Dish “Tastier”

Not all content is good content. If content is good, it provides valuable information that benefits readers. But in addition to educating and solving problems, it should be enjoyable and easy to read.

Your readers are besieged by the overwhelming amount of information readily available to them. And they are busy and easily distracted. If your content is a chore to read, it won’t take long before they give up.

So do what world-class copywriters do with their messaging: make your content easy to read.

How? For one thing, write at a fairly basic (roughly 8^th grade) level. Use simple words, brief sentences, and short paragraphs. Be mindful of white space.

Look at one of your finished articles and put yourself in your reader’s shoes for a moment; do you see a vast ocean of text or do you see lots of white space? (Hint: you want to see lots of white space because your reader does, too).

Letters From Grandma

Think of the things you love to read: a letter from Grandma or an old friend, perhaps. And think of something you hate to read: the typical corporate marketing message comes to mind. So what’s the primary difference between these two?

It’s the degree of familiarity and personalization. Notice how often the personal letters you love to read use the word “you”. We all love this word. It may be our favorite word in the English language.

Notice how the personal letter is written to you and no one else. Great copywriters build familiarity and trust in the reader’s heart and mind and draw them in by using the word “you”. They talk about the reader, their pains, their goals, and dreams.

They also write to an audience of one, not to a large, amorphous, faceless group. Their copy is crafted with a very conversational tone, like two old friends having an enjoyable conversation over lunch, not like a college research paper.

If you borrow these tricks of the trade from the world’s great copywriters, your content will be much more likely to resonate with your readers.

The Forgotten Headline

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.

– David Ogilvy

Here’s one more technique great copywriters use that you should too: They write headlines with the goal of arousing curiosity in the reader’s mind and making them want to read the copy.

This is critical to content marketing success. If you have a stellar content piece but a lame title, most readers will never get past the terrible headline to consume the remaining content – however fantastic it may be.

Select a title that arouses curiosity and hints at one or more benefits. This draws the reader in to the point where they can’t not take a closer look at the content.

How Copywriting Can Help You Market Content

You’re doing content marketing, but are you marketing your content? If all you are doing is writing content and burying it on your website’s “resources” page, you are costing yourself a lot of readership.

Content can be a fantastic tool for drawing prospects into your funnel but, in many cases, you have to persuade them to take that first step. When they are making a decision to opt-in to your email list and are on the fence about it, great copywriting skills can come to the rescue and seal the deal. Copywriting has been referred to as “selling through print,” but in a broader sense, it means to persuade someone to take a particular action.

That particular action could very well be to accept your exciting content offer. So whether it’s in an email, a landing page, or some other online marketing tool, use your best copywriting skill to “sell” potential readers on subscribing to your content funnel. Entice them to accept your content offer. Tell them what’s in it for them – how they will benefit when they do opt in.

Content marketing is a powerful tool. But you have to do it right to enjoy the kind of success you want. Tried and true copywriting techniques that worked long before we had smartphones and the Internet can help you enjoy stellar content marketing results.

The post Content Marketing and Copywriting: You Need Both appeared first on Relevance.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

– Maya Angelou

Perhaps no topic in business these days receives more attention than content marketing. It seems like everyone in business is doing it or is convinced they should be.

Content marketing can be a very powerful tool when it’s done right, but many marketers, at least in the B2B world, get the sense that they aren’t doing it right.

According to a 2014 study, “an overwhelming 85 percent (of B2B marketing leaders) fail to connect content activity to business value — and, as a result, fail to retain customers or win their long-term loyalty. In fact, when asked to look back at the past 12 months and rate the effectiveness of content marketing efforts, only 14 percent of those surveyed gave their content practices high marks for delivering value back to the business.”

What Your Content May Be Missing

People are emotional creatures. We decide and take action (including buying decisions) based largely on emotions. So, if your marketing content tries to reach your audience only through a rational approach, there’s a good chance it will fall flat.

Savvy marketers have understood the power of an emotional appeal for generations and have used it used it to make a strong impact. A recent prime example is the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign from 2013.

Even if content shouldn’t be used to directly sell products, it should help drive the sales process forward. Many marketers use content to educate readers about their products – a valid function of content marketing.

But people won’t become more inclined to buy from you just because you educate them about your product. They won’t be persuaded by features and specs alone. They’ll be persuaded to make a purchase because they are convinced you will help them solve a nagging problem or reach a goal.

Emotion is a critical driver of that decision. People are emotional about their problems and finding a solution for them (this holds true for B2B buyers, too). It is possible to gain and keep their attention by engaging their emotions early in the content marketing process.

Start with Heart: Understand Your Customer

The first step to take in harnessing the power of emotion is to gain a deep understanding of your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes.

Survey them. Interview them. Hang out in the online forums they frequent. Visit the websites they read. Read the magazines and blogs they value. Understand the emotions they feel and the emotions that drive them to take action.

Within the title and first paragraphs of the content, focus on the readers – not your product. Show empathy and use the same language and vocabulary they do with their peers.

Talk in an emotional fashion about your reader’s pain. Do what Seth Godin refers to as “selling the problem”. Drive home the point in their heart and mind that they have a painful, frustrating problem… and then give them hope that you have the solution.

The same is true of B2B buying decisions. “Businesses” don’t decide to buy anything; people do. People get emotional over their work and over work-related buying decisions, even if the decision is about choosing industrial solvents or new machinery. It’s crucial to remember this when producing content for such audiences.

In a B2B environment, content that connects to emotions can lead consumers to take the next step in the buyer’s journey – whether that is joining your email list, registering for your latest value-packed webinar or contacting your sales team.

Establish & Maintain An Emotional Connection With Your Brand

People are much more likely to buy from companies they feel an emotional connection to. Look at successful brands like Nike, Harley Davidson, and Apple. Customers feel a strong emotional attachment to these brands, and that connection is leveraged often in their marketing content.

Not only can using emotion in your content help you make more sales to new buyers, but maintaining a strong emotional connection through post-sale content can help make repeat sales and is more likely to get shared. It may even go viral.

Continue to use your marketing content to educate readers and build awareness of your products, but remember that people are emotional creatures. They make buying decisions based on their emotions, to one degree or another. Harness the power of emotion in your content to build a strong connection between your customers and your brand and you will stand out and get noticed in the crowded content marketplace.

The post The Power Of Emotion In Content Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

But along with all of these exciting developments and possibilities, a lot of hype bordering on hysteria has emerged. In recent years, a lot of unwary marketers have fallen prey to an insidious phenomenon – the “shiny object”. For the purposes of this article, the shiny object is any technological innovation that marketers flock to in hopes it will, by itself, bring them the marketing success they crave.

Many business owners and marketing professionals have pinned their hopes on various shiny objects, vainly wishing they could offer a solution to all of their customer attraction problems. In the process, they ignore proven, timeless principles that have helped many marketers succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

Social Media Isn’t the Only Shiny Object

When we think of modern marketing phenomena, the one that immediately comes to mind is social media. And social media is a very popular choice for those looking for a marketing “quick fix” or “magic bullet”. But many marketing tech innovations, or to quote legendary marketer Dan Kennedy, “digital doohickeys” have attained shiny object status in the digital marketing world.

Here’s a partial list:

• Social media
• SEO/SEM
• Mobile marketing
• Video marketing
• Email newsletters
• Blogs
• Landing pages


”Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat” -
Sun Tzu

I’m not saying these marketing tools don’t have solid potential in the right situation. I’m not saying to categorically ditch them. But I am saying that none of them is a complete marketing solution on their own.

Each one has the potential to be a very useful tool, but they need to be integrated with other tools. They need to be used according to a carefully crafted strategy aligned to each company’s specific situation and goals.

Warning: Marketing is Not a Function of Technology

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking of marketing as only a function of technology. With all the focus in today’s business world on big data, marketing automation and the myriad of tech tools available to help marketers do their jobs more effectively, this is an easy trap to fall into.

But if you approach marketing from this mindset, your efforts are likely to fall flat because, in marketing, you are dealing with people, and people have emotions. Their emotions influence their buying decisions, whether you are marketing baby accessories to new moms or petroleum products to manufacturers.

Not only do your customers make buying decisions with a largely emotional mindset, they also engage with and respond to marketing messages that influence their emotions (one reason storytelling is such a powerful marketing tool). If you treat marketing only as a function of technology, your lead generation and nurturing efforts won’t win your prospects’ hearts and minds.

Another warning: Don’t Be A Laggard

Something else to keep in mind: as you’re diligently avoiding shiny object syndrome, don’t let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. Don’t categorically reject any tool unless you are absolutely confident it will be of little or no use to you.

Indeed, you should harness the power of technological innovation to help make your efforts more successful. Use the tech tools that will help you enjoy the results you want.

Use social media to gain attention, build your brand and drive traffic to your website. Use email marketing to gain more website traffic, keep your brand in the forefront of your readers’ minds and drive sales. Use video to capture and keep your audience’s attention in a fresh, interesting way. And use targeted landing pages to remove distractions and increase your conversion rates.

As marketers, we have a mind-numbing number of golden opportunities in front of us, but we have to act wisely. We have to avoid the urge to invest all of our marketing hopes and dreams (and budgets) in the shiny object. Instead, collectively embrace all of the tools required to help us reach the results we want.

The post Shiny Object Syndrome: Why Too Much of a Good Thing Is Bad appeared first on Relevance.

This presents a problem for marketers. The more content that gets produced, the harder it becomes for them to gain and keep the attention of the readers we want to attract.

So what’s the lesson for content marketers? Relevance matters.

No, scratch that. Relevance is critical. If you are going to win readers’ (your potential customers) interest in spite of the tsunami of content on the web, you must grab their attention by being relevant to them.

A Formidable Content Marketing Obstacle

We face a lot of obstacles on our journey to content marketing success. One of the most formidable is posed by the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS helps you focus your attention on certain things, while helping you to ignore others.

This is the part of your brain that acts like a switch or gatekeeper for relevant information. It filters out information you deem to be irrelevant. On the other hand, it immediately focuses your attention when it becomes aware of something that’s important to you.

When you are trying to appeal to your target audience, the RAS can work for or against you. Use it to your advantage. You do not want to bombard your potential readers with irrelevant content. You want to get their attention with valuable information that resonates with them and is important to them, or else risk be filtered out completely.

Do You Know Your Audience Well?

It’s imperative to understand your audience intimately. Conduct extensive research and put together a profile of your “ideal reader”. What’s his world view? What does he like? What does he dislike? What does he respond to? What does he ignore? Tailor your message to appeal to your readers. Use this detailed profile to guide how you write your content and the way you market to your audience.

Remember that people are profoundly interested in themselves, so use your content to talk to them about their problems and circumstances that relate to your product. Offer them solutions to nagging problems they are struggling with, persuade them that you can help them overcome these problems and you’ll have their attention. Their RAS will let you in.

Avoid Marketing Narcissism

People don’t want to hear marketers talk in a self-centered fashion about their products and their company. If you use your content as a platform to do nothing but talk about yourself, you may very well be guilty of an objectionable practice that has been referred to as marketing narcissism.

If your audience thinks this is the case – if they think you only care about your company and telling everyone how wonderful your products are – your credibility with them will plummet. To them, your content will feel as relevant as an old, beat-up minivan is to a single guy in his twenties who is itching to buy a new sports car.

Instead, focus your message on your reader, not on you. This will help you in your quest to remain relevant in your readers’ eyes once they are engaged with your content.

First Impressions Count

How do you stand out from the crowd and capture the reader’s initial interest considering the overwhelming content deluge he is faced with?

One way is with your content’s headline or title. Your title is critical for grabbing your reader’s attention and focusing them on your message. Make your title stand out in a big way. Keeping in mind that your readers care about their needs and wants, use the headline to boldly promise, or at least imply, some kind of benefit.

Solid titles are important. You can have the world’s greatest, most value-packed, compelling white paper or case study, but if your title doesn’t strike a chord with your intended audience and if they don’t see it as being relevant to them, your content will be ignored.

Content marketing is challenging. And it’s getting tougher because our audiences are being bombarded with more and more content offerings. In an effort to prevent sensory overload, the RAS works to filter out such stimuli viewed as unimportant. Use it to your advantage by appealing to your audience in a relevant way to win their attention (and hopefully the sale).

The post Is Your Brain Hard Wired To Ignore Irrelevant Content? appeared first on Relevance.

But here’s something you many not have thought about: the importance of going beyond making the first sale to a customer. Many in the world of marketing and sales fall victim to such short-term (and short-sighted) thinking, so don’t feel bad. But please consider the advice of legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:

I’ve long believed that, rather than getting customers to make sales, it is smarter to make sales to get customers. The first provides only income. The second provides income and equity. The majority of businesspeople think only about income every day. The exceptionally smart few who get rich from business think about both, every day.

It costs you a lot less to make a repeat sale to a happy customer than it does to make the first sale. It’s also a lot easier.

As is the case when you are nurturing a lead toward their first sale; persuasive, problem-solving content can help you lay the groundwork for future sales to happy, long-term customers.

Selling: It’s Not A Dirty Word

This is a topic that would take many books to cover thoroughly. Here’s my take: don’t be afraid to sell, at the right time and in the right manner. And don’t do so apologetically.

Think of it like this: If your product will add value to your prospect’s life by solving a nagging, frustrating problem and making his life better, don’t you owe it to him to sell it to him?

Avoid the old stereotype of the sleazy, high-pressure used car salesman. Start thinking of sales as helping, listening, serving and solving problems.

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Welcome Guest Or Annoying Pest?

To paraphrase Dan Kennedy, you want to be a welcome guest, not an annoying pest. The greatest, most ethical sales people don’t shove unwanted products down a potential customer’s throat. They seek to be perceived by their prospects and customers as trusted advisers, not pushy peddlers.

Apply this attitude to your content marketing efforts and, when the time is right, use content to persuade your customers to take the action of buying from you.

Add-on Sales: Are You Leaving Money On The Table?

Here’s an example from the retail world you can apply to your post-sale content marketing, especially if you run a B2C e-commerce website.

Let’s say you run a retail store that sells men’s suits and accessories. A young customer who just graduated from law school with a new job at a prestigious firm walks into your store looking to buy suits. He’s excited and in the mood to spend money.

You take him at his word and offer him suits. He buys three. But for some reason, he never mentions shoes, belts, ties or shirts, even though he needs them all. And you, because you are afraid to be pushy, don’t offer him these accessories.

He gets in his car and spends time fighting traffic driving across town to one of your competitors. There, he buys all of these accessories that he would have bought from you if you had only offered them to him. You thought you were being polite by not selling him things he didn’t ask for, but you actually did him a disservice.

What’s the post-sale content marketing lesson here? Immediately after your customer makes a purchase, send him an email linking to your webpage that offers products complimentary to the one he just bought from you. He’s already shown that’s he’s in “buying mode”, and based on this example, you could very well be doing him a great service.

The Power Of “Thank You”

Deciding to focus on building long-term customer relationships will lead to more sales down the road that will be easier and less expensive for your company to make. This relationship building process begins before the first sale takes place, but it needs to go into high gear after the first sale is made. A very powerful (but, sadly, often overlooked) tool for jump-starting this process is a well-crafted thank you page.

Like this first-rate article from conversion rate optimization expert Theresa Baiocco implies, a great thank you page can help you combat buyer’s remorse. It can help you build strong relationships with happy, long-term customers who buy from you again and again in the future.

And it can give you opportunities to make additional sales. Think about it: Who says you can’t have a call to action in a thank you email that links to a relevant product page on your website?

Here’s another idea for leveraging the power of great thank you pages to combat buyer’s remorse: Use the content of the page to reinforce the wise decision your new customer just made and what they stand to gain from their purchase. Paint vivid “word pictures” of the benefits they’ll enjoy.

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Pave The Way For Future Sales

On the topic of buyer’s remorse, fight it further by sending your new (or not so new) customers fulfillment content that provides value by showing them how to get more productive use from your product.

Emails with links to “how-to” videos or articles are ideal for this purpose. This will help your customers get more value from their purchase, but also strengthen your relationship with them, making them more loyal to you and creating TOMA – Top Of Mind Awareness – of your brand.

This is important. When they’re ready to buy again, you want them to think about you first. And of course, you want them to do so fondly. Fulfillment content that helps your customers get more value from your product will help achieve this goal.

Build goodwill by occasionally sending emails that detail how much you appreciate their business. Make them feel important and involved with your brand. Request their feedback on their user experience with your product and emphasize how you want to use the feedback to refine your product and service to give them even more value.

Again, selling is not a dirty word. As you are distributing your post-sale content marketing through email, don’t be afraid to sell on occasion. Do you have a new product or service you think your customers would like? Send them an email telling them about your new offerings and include a call to action to a targeted product page on your website.

Content marketing is powerful. It can give your company’s bottom line a very nice boost. And it’s not limited to lead nurturing and helping to make the first sale. It can also help you gain customers for life.

The post Earn A Customer For Life With Post-Sale Content Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

“Email marketing is dead”

”Direct mail is dead”

”You need to be active on every social media channel”

“People don’t read long content anymore”

Here’s my take on that last one: long-form content is not dead. On the contrary, it’s alive and well. Let’s talk about some reasons why you might want to consider harnessing the power of long-form content and some steps you can take to produce compelling, persuasive, lengthy content that helps you convert more readers into buyers.

Benefits Of Long-Form Content

With all the Internet chatter about how people don’t read long content anymore, why use it? Simple. In the right circumstances, it works. Do it correctly, and you can enjoy a higher conversion rate.

Why? There are many reasons. Consider an old adage from sales and direct response marketing that says “The more you tell, the more you sell”. You wouldn’t send sales representatives on calls with instructions to only speak 500 words, would you? Of course not. You want them to use as many words as necessary to make the sale.

So it is with your content. Why would you limit your content marketing effectiveness by sticking to some arbitrary rule that says you can only write short messages? Use as many words as you need to in order to state your case and give your reader the valuable, problem-solving information he needs.

Still not convinced that long-form content can lead to more sales? Take a look at this case study of conversion tests for crazyegg.com. In one test mentioned in the article, a new, much longer page outperformed the original by 30%.

Says the article, “The media would have us believe that people no longer have any capacity to concentrate. In reality, you cannot have a page that’s too long – only one that’s too boring. In the case of Crazy Egg’s home page, visitors wanted their many questions answered and that’s what we delivered.”

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The Power Of Storytelling

Long-form content gives you a better platform for telling stories. As humans, we are hardwired to respond to well-told stories that invoke emotions. Think about the times you’ve been moved – maybe even to tears – by a story from a book, the mouth of a friend or in a movie.

We are moved to action by stories. This holds true in the world of marketing and sales also. Tell a content marketing story in which your reader can imagine himself as the hero, and you’ll have his attention riveted to your message.

One reason well-crafted stories can be such powerful marketing tools is that they have the effect of drawing the reader into them in such a fashion that he won’t feel like you’re trying to sell him; he’ll sell himself for you.

Long-Form Content Gives SEO Benefits

Here’s another benefit of long-form content and more evidence it’s far from dead; it can help your SEO efforts.

Doesn’t it make sense that long content will give you more opportunity to go in-depth and offer readers more value? Google seems to think so. The search engine’s new algorithm gives SERP priority to longer-form, in-depth content that features relevant images, is of high quality and offers substantial value to readers.

According to web analytics expert Neil Patel, “the more links a web page has, the higher it will typically rank on search engines… which is why the average web page that ranks on the first page of Google has over 2,000 words of content.”

Not only does long content attract more backlinks, it is more likely to get shared via social media and be ranked higher for long-tail keywords.

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Writing Effective Long-Form Content

Keep in mind that finishing a piece of long-form content requires longer focus, more time and more total mental energy from your reader. Therefore, it’s important that you make it interesting and easy to read.

Focus your message on your reader, his needs and wants and how you can help him solve a pressing problem. Through your content’s message, offer him value he can take and benefit from, even if he never buys your product.

Nobody cares about your products (except you) – David Meerman Scott

Keep this quote in mind as you write your content. People don’t care about your product, per se; they care about what your product can do for them. Make sure this important distinction is reflected in your content – long or short.

• Unlearn what you were taught in college English: Don’t completely abandon that formal, academic style of writing, but learn to write content in a conversational, easygoing – yet still professional – tone.
• Write like you talk: Write to an audience of one, not to a crowd. Write just as if you were having a one-on-one conversation, and use the word “you” often.
• Once again for emphasis: Make your content easy to read. Avoid long, compound sentences and large paragraphs. Think about it. How do you feel when faced with the prospect of reading a block of text 30 lines long? You don’t enjoy it. Your mind rebels at the idea.

Let Me Entertain You

Here’s one more tip for writing long content readers stay focused on: make it entertaining. Maybe you’re thinking, “My B2B audience is different. They won’t respond to entertaining content.”

Remember, those decision makers on the receiving end of your content are human beings just like you and I. Who says they won’t go for a little entertainment in the content they read? Think about this quote from Jerry Seinfeld:

People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.

I’m not saying you should be absurdly silly and unprofessional, but I am suggesting that you consider adding a little entertainment value to your content as a way to stand out from the crowd and get attention.

Just because you prefer (and get great results from) short content doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from long-form content, too. This isn’t an either-or proposition. Try a mix of both.

And please don’t limit your marketing effectiveness because of common misconceptions such as “Long-form content is dead.” and “No one has time to read anymore”. Give your audience engaging, compelling, interesting, problem-solving content that focuses on them (and maybe even offers a little bit of entertainment), and they’ll make the time.

The post Is Long-Form Content Part of Your Strategy? appeared first on Relevance.