Inbound Marketing Blog

3 September, 2016

How to make your content stand out

Written by Josh Mason

on 3 September, 2016

Ah the irony of writing a blog post about how to make your content stand out when there are already a thousand posts out there about how to make your content stand out.

However I’m not going to talk about promotion at all here because that’s not what I mean by stand out. Promotion helps your content to be found and read sure, but it doesn’t mean that it’s any good.

What I want to talk about is if there was no such thing as content promotion, what would make your content more readable, shareable and memorable than the rest?

Change up the Format and Execution

Content doesn’t just mean blogging, as much as people seem to think it does (we’re guilty of this ourselves).

There’s a whole world of different content formats out there that people often neglect.

This lack of variation in the formats of content may be down to a lack of time. Blogging is quick and easy, on average it takes about 2 hours to knock out a blog post. However, with content like videos and infographics, the investment of time is significantly greater.

Yet if you don’t have time for much more than blogging, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a play around with the execution of a post. You could write a story in the third person, write a transcript between two people, write a short form 200 word opinion piece, write a rant, write a letter. There are plenty of techniques that you can use to refresh a blog post that don’t require you to change the format altogether.

Here are just three techniques that we use to try and stand out from the crowd.

Be Specific

In order to get your content found by the right people, you need to decide who they are and use your posts to answer their questions. This will make it specific to a particular person and query.

Not only will you be more likely to attract the right sort of traffic, but this specificity means that you won’t have to compete with others over broad search engine keywords.

It may also mean that a post has less traffic, but the traffic it has is more likely to convert. After all, would you rather have 2,000 views at a 0.3% conversion rate? Or 500 views at a 5% conversion rate?

Forget about appealing to the masses, just write for the people that you want to talk to; your dream customers.

Make them Laugh

Humour is one of the least utilised tools in the marketing world, especially in B2B marketing.

It is one of our strongest emotions, even thinking about a past funny moment gets you smiling again. And I bet you can remember every detail of that moment, including what led up to it and the aftermath.

Making people laugh leaves a strong impression and makes readers more likely to return. It’s obviously won’t appropriate to use all of the time, but if you know where your target audience’s funny bone is, you might as well poke it for all that it’s worth when you can.

Personalise it

Blogging was invented so that people could express themselves and tell others about their individual experiences. Getting back to this original intention is a good way of making your content stand out.

The likelihood of someone having the same, or even a similar experience to you is pretty slim. So by talking about your own experiences, you’re automatically making the story more original and interesting to read.

You don’t have to expose your deepest darkest secrets to the whole world, just tell a story from your perspective. This not only leads to more a readable piece, but adds an openness to your business blog that not many companies take advantage of.

Allowing readers to get to know the real people behind a company is more likely to keep them engaged and look out for upcoming posts in the future.