6 Tips to Creating Compelling Content Your Audience Will Share

What makes content worthy of being shared? It’s got to spark interest, be informative, entertaining or inspiring.

When writing a blog, crafting a tweet, or creating a story, it’s understandable to get caught up in brand goals and ROI. You may lose focus on what is the most effective approach to promote a new product or campaign.

But why do we create content? Ultimately, we want to be helpful or entertain our audiences. By attracting them, we earn their trust, and this translates into business value in the form of loyal customers and revenue.

When cultivating brand loyalty, the key is to present your audience with content that they will feel a connection with, whether it makes them laugh, think, or care. The important thing is that it prompts them to want to share it with their network of friends.

According to Smart Insights, Content marketing has become an almost universal tactic, with almost 90% of companies using it in 2016, and even more utilizing it in 2017. Unfortunately, now that most marketers have recognized the value of content, we are now entering the era of Content Shock. Every 60 seconds across the web, 1400 blogs, 500 hours of video, 3.3 million Facebook posts, over 448,000 tweets, and almost 66,000 Instagram photos are being published.

How do you get heard above all this content noise? With more and more companies competing for audience attention, creating compelling content is becoming harder. To get the most traction, you’ll need short- and long-term strategies. No matter the size your marketing budget, these ideas can help you get others to share your content.

1. Don’t Waste Time on Platforms Where You Won’t Find Your Customers

With so many different platforms and opportunities to message your audience, it may seem like a good idea to create a presence across all of them so as to cover more ground. However, we spread ourselves thin when we do this, and we miss opportunities. Instead, we need to meet our customers where they are and on the platforms they most frequent.

2. Use Brand Story-building Techniques

Brand storytelling gives us the opportunity to tell stories as part of our direct and indirect brand marketing initiatives. Storytelling comes in many forms – articles, novels, movies, blog posts, videos presentations and more.

However, good story-building requires a keen understanding of who your customers are. By knowing their behaviors and habits, you’ll have an easier time knowing what topics interest them. By regularly listening to what your audience has to say with the use of social media tools, you’ll be able to create brand stories that compel them.

Social Mention collects aggregated data across multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The basic analytics that you gather can help you determine if the sentiment is positive or negative.

Tools like Fedica enable marketers to predict what stories on Twitter will trend based on keyword searches. Fedica guides your publishing by giving you insight into trending topics among your followers by location. Know what your followers are talking about now, so you get involved in discussions that matter.

And Meltwater will help you stay on top of and extract the insights you need from billions of real-time editorial, social media conversations, and blogs.

3. Curate and Categorize Influencers

Do you know who the influencers in your niche are?

With social media, it’s come to the point where people have begun to trust their circles more than companies. The stars of social media or better known as influencers have more influence on what people buy than traditional marketing tactics. So if an influencer shares your content, people will be more drawn to it. Because their voices are respected, your content gains instant credibility.

Recognize who the influencers are in your industry. Curated and categorized lists save you time.

These respected voices add instant credibility to your work and information. Get their attention by tagging them on content you publish that you know they will enjoy and may share.

4. Create an Emotional Connection To Your Brand

By creating familiarity in your stories, you create an automatic emotional connection to your brand. Depending on your brand, you may cater to a particular demographic. Knowing those demographics can help you create content that has cultural triggers. It could speak to their generation or backgrounds.

Ultimately, the goal is to make them feel something in their own lives and eventually for your brand. Specific triggers get more people to spread our message, share our content, gain traction, and win customers, allowing us to beat the competition.

And when you hit that emotional nerve, they’ll want to share it with their family and friends who they know will have a similar emotional response.

5. Teach Them Something

Providing your audience with interesting facts, beautiful infographics or even funny but otherwise useless tips is an excellent way to connect. People share content for different reasons.

But ultimately, shareable content is content that people feel they’ve learned something from or been entertained by. By giving the audience insight into your brand through the content you create, you provide them with a new level of understanding of who you are which gets your audience thinking.

6. Report on Current Trends

It is human nature to want to follow trends. There are many reasons why people follow trends but whatever the reason, people crave information on what is considered “hot news,” popular, and current. It leads people to believe that they are ahead of the game and will be admired by their peers because of it.

By being a reliable source of the most current information, they will look forward to your content and share it knowing that you are a trustworthy authority for relevant news in your industry.

Map Out a Long-Term Strategy

As mentioned, reporting on current trends, teaching something new, etc is helpful in gaining a reputation as an authority. However, you have to find the right balance between providing your audience with content that will catch their attention now and content that will leave them with a long-lasting impression of your brand.

It all starts with a strategy and a plan. Because your marketing goals are to identify leads, drive conversions to increase profits, create content with your long-term goals in mind through a content strategy that aligns with your brand strategy. Essentially, don’t publish content for the sake of getting noticed if it will be quickly forgotten as trends often do.