It’s 6 p.m. on a Saturday night and Emma is about to go out on the first date she’s been on in a long time. She’s nervous because she’s afraid she’ll forget the rules of the game.
What if I have nothing to say or all I can talk about is content marketing?
Emma is a girl who loves her some content marketing. She lives and breathes it, which is why she’s good at what she does.
As she discards her eighth outfit option onto a mountain of clothes on the floor and returns to the closet looking for something more inspiring, a thought occurs to her.
If I were dressing up a content strategy, what would I suggest?
Well, that’s easy, she thinks. Just earlier that day she’d spoken with a client, suggesting that, as part of their content strategy, they offer some freebies — a white paper download or a study, perhaps. Something that would give their audience just a taste without giving it all away.
“You see,” she’d said, “you need to hook them with some really great content, and if you offer them something for free, they’re more likely to come back and develop a relationship with your content and you.”
Emma tries a little black dress with a modest neckline. It’s neither too prudish nor too revealing. Perfect! she thinks.
Let your content show a little skin! Don’t be afraid to give your readers and potential clients an idea of what you’ve got to offer.
Mike picks her up right at 7:00.
I love knowing when to expect content — I mean people! People! she thinks.
As they get into the car, Mike tells Emma about his hockey league. Emma knows nothing about hockey, but the team sounds interesting.
It’s okay, she assures herself. This is just his way of content marketing. A good content strategy would put some (ideally valuable) content out there and try to get the audience to interact with it — to watch the videos, click the links, and leave comments.
So Emma interacts with the content.
“That sounds really interesting. How long have you been playing on this league?”
And her quick application of content marketing strategies leads them to a conversation about what sports they enjoy. By interacting with the content, she discovered that they both share a love of kayaking, which just opened up further dialogue.
Your goal is to get your audience to interact with your content and give it some time and attention. You want it to be interesting enough to hook them, and captivating enough to keep them involved.
“So I was thinking,” Mike says. “I know I said we were going to go to The Beach House for dinner, but then I thought that maybe you might like to go to Russo’s for dinner, and then we could take a walk out on the pier and go to The Beach House a bit later for dessert?”
Ooh! Repurposing content! I like a man who offers options.
“That sounds great!” she replies.
When creating a content strategy, don’t be afraid to take old ideas and turn them into something new. Old blog posts can become white papers or eBooks. Tweets, status updates, and videos can become blog posts. Text can become infographics. The list goes on! Once you have some sort of goal in mind (conversions, clicks, unique views, etc.), don’t be afraid to walk your content for miles to help meet that goal.
At the end of an enjoyable evening out, Mike drops her off back at her house.
When creating good content, you hope to elicit a reaction of some sort to indicate that your audience enjoyed it and found it useful — some kind of conversion, be it a blog comment, a download, or a new subscription. He’s shown me some pretty good content tonight, so…
Emma leans over and gives Mike a kiss on the cheek.
“Thank you for a great night!” she says. “We should go out again soon!”
“Definitely!” Mike replies. “How does Tuesday night sound?”
So you see, dating strategies could take a few tips from content marketing. Those “What Would Content Marketers Do?” bracelets will be out any day now, I’m sure of it!
And as for our content marketer, Emma, well, as neurotic as she may be, she finally found her Prince Charming.
Where else do you think the rules of content marketing could apply? Have you ever found yourself applying them to your own life? Let us know in the comments!