In a time where everyone is fighting for differentiation in the market space, how do you make your content stand out? How do you guide your audience to look where your content is?

Let’s do a little activity before we dive deep into this article.

Go to Google, and type the term your ideal customer would search if they want to buy a service or product that you offer.

You’ll probably find hundreds of pages worth of similar content in search results. With so much content and channels to choose from, people are turning less and less to the same sources. And brands are competing to win their attention.

Insight: To win the war for attention, you need to capture your audience through inbound marketing.

Data: 74% of companies find that lead quality and quantity increase when introducing a content marketing strategy. (Curata)

Key Action Point: Use the following content marketing strategies to make sure your content stands out in today’s crowded marketplace.

Find Your Unique Voice

To get heard, you need to first find your unique voice and point of view — one that sets yourself apart from everyone else in your industry. You need to make sure your content stands out amidst all the noise.

To distinguish yourself, you need to be clear on the following points:

1. Who is your ideal customer?

2. What is your end goal?

3. What are you trying to get them to do?

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Get Predatory

Once you’re clear on these points, get predatory. Predatory marketing means more than just filling the needs of your customers. You need to take a close look at the competition and target the weakness that comes from their strength.

Ask yourself, “Who has my money?” This means you need to determine where your money would go if your business doesn’t exist.

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Boost Content through Paid Media

Another way to ensure your content gets more eyeballs is through paid media. Paid media means paying to promote your content so you can reach your audience, raise brand awareness, and get visibility quickly.

This can be in the form of paid social media ads, Google search ads, retargeting, paid advertising, and influencer marketing.

Nowadays, paid media has become a valuable resource that can help business owners stand out and engage with their audience more.

A good example of a paid media strategy includes the use of targeted social media ads in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, which enables marketers to target both posts and conventional ads through a detailed criteria that fit your content marketing campaign.

You can get in front of the right people and target users according to interests, gender, geographic, or device.

You can also do retargeting on display with a retargeting list so you can promote your content to it inexpensively on AdRoll or through Google retargeting.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The only way to make a dent in the content marketing space is to create valuable content and to do it often. Keep putting out relevant and useful content, promote it through your social media channels, and use email marketing to send it to as many people as possible.

More than anything, consistency is key. Blogging often helps you get more subscribers, which means a greater chance for you to build your audience as well as retain them.  

According to HubSpot, companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages than businesses without blogs. As you publish more content, Google will continue to increase your page rank, making it easier for customers to find you.

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Surprise Broca’s Area of the Brain

“A bad content is about the advertiser. A good ad is about the customer.”

— The Wizard of Ads

According to the Wizard of Ads, Broca’s area is that part of the brain that rejects the mediocre and the mundane.

This area “ignores the predictable but allows the delightfully surprising to have immediate access to the visuospatial sketchpad of the listener’s imagination.”

When it comes to your content, think of how you can surprise your audience’s Broca’s area. Come up with content that always delights, surprises, and inspires. Putting out a mediocre blog post in a content-cluttered space won’t cut it. No one will notice what you say unless you make it worth their time.  

To make your content stand out, follow the Wizard of Ads philosophy and apply these elements:

• Use unexpected and colourful content instead of the common and the predictable.

• Avoid using words that do not contribute to an overall more vivid and colourful mental image.

• Delight your audience with an element of surprise using content that is engaging and memorable.

• Be bold. Invent words and industry terms that your audience will know you for.

• There’s a reason Monet was such a celebrated artist. To stand out in your marketing strategy, don’t mind the details. Go for exaggerated colours and content that you will be remembered for.

Use Cialdini’s Influence

Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book on Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion talks about the six principles of persuasion. He says that in a time where we’re bombarded with so much data and information, it can be difficult for us to process everything and make informed decisions.

So we turn to what Cialdini calls signals. In the Psychology of Persuasion, he has identified six signals that you can use to amplify your content.

• Reciprocity. Create useful content and share it for free. This way, your recipients will respond in kind through shares, engagement, and promotion.

• Commitment. Asking for email addresses for a newsletter subscription encourages your audience to read and make use of the content they were given access to.

• Social proof. Getting more likes and engagement for your content draws your audience to share it too.

• Liking. Getting on with relevant content being talked about today.

• Authority. Being seen as a thought leader in your niche.

• Scarcity. Promoting content that’s new and has not been talked about before.

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