Creative Content is King
Using creative content as an outreach tool IS king, especially for DIY PR business owners and preferably these days in video format. It doesn’t have to be though … you’ve seen creative meme’s too. Content has the ability to showcase your company as a thought leader, in addition to having some major SEO, social media, and lead generation benefits. In terms of public relations, content also has the ability to get media coverage. It is an outreach tool.
It‟s simple, really. By creating something interesting, compelling, or even funny, people will naturally want to talk about it, share it with their friends, or even write about it – no pitching required. Think about why videos go viral. It‟s not because someone spent a lot of time crafting an amazing pitch to a journalist. It’s because the content itself was so remarkable, people couldn’t help but spread it. And most viral content started by pinging bloggers, emails to clients or friends, and sometimes, tagging celebrities. If you’re lucky, a celebrity will see it and share it on their feed.
What is content creation? It is the process of generating topic ideas that appeal to your buyer persona, creating written or visual content around those ideas, and making that information accessible to your audience as a blog, video, infographic, or other format.
Here is a free template for you: Buyer Persona Template 1.
Content strategy is a vital part of any business plan because it drives traffic to your website and other online channels. Content production that includes blogging, videos, and social media, the content marketing industry grows each day enormously. However, content creation must follow a content strategy to be truly effective. Developing content strategies involves researching your users, competitive content analysis, and content quality control.
Why is it crucial to develop a good strategy? Proper content planning ensures that the content you publish will positively impact your brand, for example, by increasing traffic, leads, and conversions. It also gives journalist the opportunity to get to know you and pull from your content.
How To Build The Perfect Content Strategy
1. Set goals: You can’t effectively manage your content marketing campaigns without setting goals. You have to know what you want to accomplish with your content marketing efforts before developing an execution plan.
2. Investigate your competition: Your content strategy should set you apart from other businesses in your industry. It’s important to do some competitive analysis before beginning the development process because this will help determine where your business fits into the industry and what types of content are already being published across the web.
3. Develop a plan for execution: A content calendar with current content topics and themes, due dates for each topic or theme, what keywords you want to target per piece of content, and how frequently these pieces of content will be published is all it takes to create a strategic plan.
Before we go down the rabbit hole of tackling content strategy, remember this .. you need to resonate with your customers, not journalists. You need to educate, not promote. Think outside of the box.
Newsflash: Reporters are humans, and 99.9% of humans prefer remarkable, interesting, and dynamic content over bland, boring, and unequivocally promotional writing. When writing an announcement, either on your blog or as a press release, focus on what’s different, unique, and narrative-driven versus just going through the motions with any release. Don’t be afraid to spice up your releases a little bit for lighter announcements. You could even provide some ‘Tweet This’ links for reporters, viewers, and customers to easily share your headlines and quotes.
We have a few examples of creative content we love and definitely lead to media coverage. We are aware that many “viral videos” are from big companies who have big budgets. Examples are to provide thoughts around being highly creative. You don’t have to have big budgets to be creative and if you are not creative, it’s worth the money to hire someone who is creative.
ALWAYS “LIKE A GIRL” CAMPAIGN
- The first example is from big business, so they had the budget for this. However, it’s still fantastic content that made quite the buzz, out of the box for a feminine product and it’s one of our favorites.
ALWAYS “LIKE A GIRL” CAMPAIGN – doing things “like a girl” was a derogatory phrase until ALWAYS changed that and showed young girls being strong and being confident. This youtube video received over 69m views. Run like a girl now means to win the race. Super poignant. The campaign was successful in going viral because they looked at creating an advertisement that was completely different from its competition in every sense.
GIRLS DON’T POOP
2. This is another favorite. The small Dallas, Texas based company “PooPouri” was doing fairly well and spreading their message of keeping any smell at bay when going poo. They hired an ad agency to create a Youtube video with an American actress who could do a British accent really well, spreading the message that you can go poo at a party and not be embarrassed. Before the video was approved by the CEO, the video was leaked onto Youtube. It went viral and racked up over 165m views.
If you haven’t seen this, it’s hysterical and very creative. CEO, Suzy Batiz, had always been creative and a serial entrepreneur. She never shied away from her ‘bathroom’ product being something people don’t want to talk about. She nailed the voice of her brand, which can make or break your marketing efforts. If you go look at her Youtube channel, her content is a constant story of the issues we have with the smell of poo. I think if she can do this … you can certainly come up with fabulous content too.
TAKEAWAY: Making content highly important to your business will have a great impact.