How to create a King Content?

The motto is here, and since the launch of Hummingbird (the new algorithm of Google), content has been crowned king of the online marketing kingdom. It is true that Google, with the new update of the search algorithm (the program that gives the results when somebody does a Google search), gave a particular place to content creation. Any online marketer knows by now that organic and referral traffics will be driven by content creation. But there is a shortfall to this new trend: everybody is creating content, and if quantity may be good for some businesses, the quality of the content is not always there. So creating content for the sake of creating content, is it a good idea? The obvious answer is no. But how can you make your good, clever and original content stand in a sea of poor quality content? How to create content that will be crowned king?

1- Think outside the box.

In this mass of insipid and tasteless content, your creation needs to be different to be noticed. The box is where all your competitors and other company are advertising with a slightly identical content. You need to be outside of this box, stand by yourself with a revolutionary idea. Think big, think original and think clever. Lego is a very good example of outside the box creation with a full scale X-Wing (spaceship from Star Wars) made out of legos and exposed in Time Square :

   

The brand is known for having a lot of their products tied to the trilogy of Georges Lucas, and the announcement of new movies by Disney created the opportunity for Lego to surf on the Star Wars wave. But to be noticed in the middle of all the content related to the movies, the brand of the blocks needed to strike hard, with something big and original. Of course, this is an extreme example, but the idea is there. This creation gave the brand an incredible exposure and fresh content that talks to people, to followers, to customers...

2- Tell the world something that matters

Your content may be big and original, but if the core of it is empty, your business will not bring the ROI expected. On top of originality, the content needs a soul, a real background story that rise the interest and the curiosity of the reader. This emotional factor is often forgotten by marketers who only focus on the size and visibility.

An internet reader spends hours online, and will see hundreds of blogs, pictures and articles. The only way for this reader to become a lead or a customer is to give him something that plays with his or her emotions, and give him or her the will to stay and learn more. Intel, with its new blog Intel IQ, is a good example of emotional content. 

This blog, highlighted by Ecoconsultancy,  is the new blog launched by the micro chip company. In order to connect with a younger audience, Intel launched this blog , made by the employees of the brand. The idea is to create content by using engineers and employees curated content with the form of an online magazine, and it helps giving a human face to Intel. Intel IQ ranks 1078th in the USA according to Alexa.com, showing the success of the story telling strategy. 

3- Be sharable

It is crucial to have a good, original and emotional content. It is even more important to be able to share it. A good content is a content that will appeal to the reader and will be shared, the main objective being to go viral and to bring people to your website without paying for traffic. Your content needs to be shared on social media and linked to your social media to insure that it will be sharable and shared. The most platforms you use, the better it is. For example, WestJet with their Christmas operation , got more than 200 000 views in 16 hours only. The second day the story was on national television, and the video became the most shared video in 2013. Thanks to a good relay of their story on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube...), the content was a hit and increased the exposure of the company.

 

4- Target the right audience and make the customer part of the process.

Targeting an audience in a world where information travels at the speed of light is not an easy task, and an efficient content creation process depends on a good target audience. But how to target the right audience for your next campaign. The solution is to listen to your audience and see what they want. Thanks to social media, your business has the opportunity to be social, meaning that you can involve your customers and fans/followers in your content creation process. A Twitter or a Facebook contest involving the experience of the customer with the product is a good way to figure where is your audience and what your audience wants. You will be able to use this data to build a content more adapted to your audience. Use social media to be social and your content quality will increase.

As a conclusion, their is a difference between content king and king content. The difference is the quality of the production that will be the reflection of your company, the image of your brand to the world. Creating a content that will be king is not easy, and requires originality, soul, accessibility and a good audience. The combination of these 4 component should give you and your business the ability to create content that may become an heir to the throne of the content kingdom. Take it EZ.