Why Content is Such a Buzzword in Business

In the age of ecommerce, the way in which companies and clients interact has changed greatly in recent years, and posting advertisements simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Prospective customers wish to feel part of a community, so strategies must be drawn up that will encourage inclusion and engagement.

Indeed, people who enjoy reading content such as blogs and watching videos produced by specific brands are more likely to purchase goods and services from that company. This is because content helps to build brand authority, establishing the firm as experts and increasing trust.

Traditional advertising provides little more than a snapshot of what your company is about. Regular articles and blogs can be used to give customers a view behind the scenes and let them get to know your business, and even the personalities of your staff.

Good quality content is particularly effective alongside social media campaigns, with research showing that people are more likely to do business with companies they have engaged with on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Because these social networks encourage sharing, there’s a strong chance that good quality content will be passed around interested parties, thus increasing your brand’s visibility at no extra cost. In turn, this will increase the amount of traffic to your website and lead to long-lasting relationships with valuable clients.

If you have the budget to enlist the services of a professional content creator and social media expert, then great, but if not you should look to take on the task yourself. Even a small amount of content on an intermittent basis can make a huge difference to your business.

To thrive today and rank highly in search engines, businesses of all sizes must create new, original, and engaging content that users want to read and to share. According to Google’s own guidance, this is the only way to thrive in their index.

Brands can also see major benefits from seeing their content shared on social media. Google have well publicised the fact that social sharing has no impact on search engine rank, but a piece of content that “goes viral” can be a powerful content generator in and of itself. Infographics, videos, and memes are all increasingly popular with big brands that are seeking to capture the attention of younger consumers.

How can you make sure your content has the best chance of going viral? It can be difficult to predict exactly what will go viral, but there are steps you can take to increase the chances of your content being shared.

Studies show that people are much more likely to share content if it’s either practically useful or evokes strong emotions like joy, humour or awe. Negative emotions can be targeted too, but the data suggests that people prefer to share good news.

The best approach is therefore to combine practicality with emotion. Create a piece of surprising, funny, remarkable and practical advice that solves a common problem, and you’ll maximise your shares, retweets, comments and links.

Header Image from Flickr under the Creative Commons Licence. No changes made.

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