Four ways to make your online content stand out in 2016
Top tips for creating a stand-out communication strategy and building your internet presence over the next 12 months
This time of year everyone is making New Year’s resolutions. For some, it may be to make each boxercise session as tough as a Rocky training montage. For others, it may be to give up drinking alcohol before lunchtime. But for many businesses, one of their main goals for 2016 will be to ensure that they are driving increased traffic to their website with an effective online content marketing strategy.
But with everyone, from your former colleague’s horse* to the local takeaway, having an online presence these days, how can you make your content stand out in a crowded marketplace? We look at four trends that will enable you to maximise the visibility of your online content in 2016.
Movie magic
Your video of 80-year-old Uncle Frank strutting his stuff after too many sherries has sent your Facebook friends into a frenzy over Christmas. Perhaps you can take this idea and create video content to attract clients to your business web page. Just without the sherry, Uncle Frank or ABBA.
Video content has steadily been on the rise in recent years and is predicted to account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2019, according to technology giant Cisco. While a large proportion of this may consist of videos of monkeys falling off branches and the suchlike, evidence shows that video is also an effective engagement tool for business executives.
According to US business magazine Forbes, 75% of senior executives watch work-related videos at least once a week, while 59% state that given the choice between text and video on a web page, they will go for the video option.
Just having the word “video” in an email subject line will encourage 19% more of your clients to open your email and 65% more of them to click through to your website, according to digital marketing consultancy Syndacast.
Get personal
There’s nothing worse than having to listen to one of your colleagues bang on about the gnarly black runs they were charging down on their recent skiing trip, if you have absolutely no interest in snow-based sports.
The same goes for your clients. If you are an accountant and the bulk of your clients are small business owners who make a modest living, they are not going to be interested in content telling them how to reduce their inheritance tax on a £10m estate.
Likewise, a client who lights his hand-rolled Cuban cigars with a £50 note isn’t going to be interested in the latest tax breaks for micro businesses.
By tailoring your content to segmented groups of clients and contacting them at relevant times, based on the data you collect from them, you are more likely to get repeat business. According to a survey carried out by the Chief Marketing Officer Council last year, 43% of marketers said that personalised content led to more conversions.
Influential endorsement
Olympic diver Tom Daley almost broke the internet recently after posting a photo of his compartmentalised frying pan. Not only did the photo get almost 50,000 likes on Instagram but it also garnered column inches in the Guardian, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express and the Sun (to name but a few).
Whether Tom bought the Master Frying Pan, or was paid to promote it, is unclear, but it has sold out on Amazon and gained substantial coverage.
Unsurprisingly, influencer marketing (getting authorities or celebrities to mention or promote products and services) is now considered the most rapidly expanding way to acquire new customers.
While you may not be able to secure the patronage of a sports star or reality TV heavyweight, securing regular retweets from an authority in your field is a great way to not only build your social media following but also to increase traffic to your website.
Mobile and multi-device marketing
We now view online content through a variety of devices and platforms and mobile consumption is increasing massively. According to Google, internet access via smartphone exceeds that of PCs in several countries. Therefore, businesses need to ensure that their content is optimised for mobile.
Yet the uptake in mobile consumption hasn’t resulted in a drop-off in internet traffic from PCs so your online content still needs to engage the users of desktop and laptop computers. Not only that, but it needs to be compelling enough that it interrupts them from their work or whatever else they are doing.
“Interruption” is the latest buzzword in online marketing – and it’s getting harder to achieve in an age that is full of digital noise.
If you would like to speak to Love Letters about your online content marketing strategy for 2016, you can contact us here.
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*And yes, that part about a member of the Love Letters team once working with someone whose horse had their own blog, is true. Apparently they used to write it on the hoof (erm, that bit’s not true). For the horse’s blog, click here.