How to survive (as a marketer) in a “content tsunami”

So, I question myself how to stand out and be chosen in this growing flood of content? My advice to you: It starts by being excellent. That means that you have to create content that your audience really is in need of. Address the challenges they have and give them all your expertise on the subject that you can provide. Add your true passion for your customers and their businesses, you have come a long way. One more thing, be consistent and hang in there. It takes time to do great stuff and this is no exception.

This is what I see you need to consider to make your awesome content stand out:

• Don´t “over-do” your productions. Your expertise shall not be hidden in nicely and well designed productions. People don´t buy into “adverts” or polished material. It´s just to pretty and people are not looking for perfection, they´re looking for knowledge. 

• Don´t deliver too many absolute truths! You know the feeling when someone tries to tell you exactly how it is!? No one wants to be told exactly what to do and how to do it. People, especially marketers, are creative and willing to learn and adapt to new things that improves their job. But we want to add that new knowledge to our own experiences and ideas to make it work. Don´t see your audience as a group of fresh years students (even if they are…), see them as individuals with their own experiences. 

• Learn how to write headlines that stands out from the Main Stream. It´s the most important part of your blog posts. If you don´t figure out a headline that attracts attention, no one will ever read your post. Take your time, try and try one more time before posting. This post is a good one on this topic from@copyblogger http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/ 

• Make your blog a nice and valuable place to be! The chance to get someone back to your blog if they didn´t like it the first time is almost impossible. The quality of your posts are top priority. Make sure that your blog is easy to read, use nice quality pictures, serve good external links to other great sources of knowledge and create a “library” where your audience easily can enjoy and share your content. There is a lot of really good and useful blogs out there, this is one of my favorites written by SAP:s@brennermichael This is his site http://www.b2bmarketinginsider.com/

• Add your personality! Yes, you should do that, no question about it. A lot of people, including myself, sometimes becomes formal and stilted when it comes to writing. We are scared that people will think that we´re not serious or credible if we´re not acting like a strict lawyer. The fact of the matter is that personal posts are more read than non personal. The best example I can think of is @garyvee, Gary Waynerchuk that put all his personality and engagement in everything he does. http://garyvaynerchuk.com/ 

• Less is more! Or, make your point and leave it up to your readers to “work” with your material. In my opinion, content marketing is not about making so much content as possible and it´s not about making a world record in pages either. The blogs that I like and often comes back to, have understood that I want to add knowledge to my own and grow my skills. 

To this it comes a lot of techniques to spread your wise words to a broad audience, but that´s a different story, I promise to get back to that in a future post. 

What´s your experiences on the subject? Do you agree with me or am I way out of control as you see it? No matter what, for Marketers this is a serious issue to address in their work. If your content does not reach your audience it does not work. In the old marketing world you could get away with buying some more space to shout out your message. In this world, where buyers use the web as their source to gain knowledge, your content has to attract your audience and make them want to stay around for more. We do all know that, but I am not sure we´re taking this question serious enough.

After all, we don´t want to drown our customers, we want to make them surf on our wave of expertise.

Happy marketing to you all!