If there is one argument I love to have, it’s debating the concept of professional language. Too often, it describes flawed attempts to emulate an academic thesis or a Victorian bank manager. You know the sort of stuff—a white paper, official email or corporate website where the language is so dense, formal and archaic that your brain melts from the sheer dullness of it all.
We’re drowning in a flood of content. Whatever your interest, there is enough content published every day and vying for your attention that you could never hope to discover it all—let alone consume it. Yet most content marketing struggles to stand out and attract an audience because it often lacks a unique or effective angle. When planning your content, the goal should always be to produce content not found anywhere else. Otherwise, what’s the point? If a hundred other brands or content hubs got there before you, how is your generic and derivative listicle going to cut through the noise?
The internet loves quotations. Social media definitely loves quotations. These days, it seems all you have to do to achieve viral gold is slap an inspirational quote onto a sunset and then spam it to every network. But while the right quote, correctly attributed, can lend authority and gravitas to your content, an inaccurate or dodgy quote can just as easily undermine it.
Just because you’re telling stories on behalf of a brand doesn’t mean the rules are any different than if you were telling fairy tales to young children. There may be more complex ideas and a little less fantasy, but for any story to work, it must still adhere to certain principles. While they might seem arbitrary, these principles are central to how good stories tap into our natural thought processes, sparking imagination, conveying meaning and resonating long after the final line.
The Content Marketing Institute released the 2016 Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets, and Trends for Australia report a few days ago, and I’ve been stewing over exactly what these numbers mean for the local industry. As Joe Pulizzi’s initial wrap-up points out, there are some interesting anomalies in here that invite interpretation and further investigation. But […]
The GI Joe comic book is probably the best known case study of a brand partnering with a comic publisher for content marketing. But GI Joe was far from the first. Wall’s Ice Cream beat Hasbro by over thirty years, with the weekly Tommy Walls comic strip.