5 Tips for Getting People to Read Your Content

The buzz is all about content marketing these days. Direct mail, newsletters, white papers, social media, blogs. But more important than the channel used to deliver your content is the content itself. Are you giving your audience something they want to read?

Here are give tips for developing content that will engage your customers and prospects and serve as a powerful marketing vehicle for your brand.

1. Develop a strategy.
   Be strategic about releasing your content. What information do you want to deliver? In what order? Does timing matter? Do you need to deliver different content to different segments of your audience or through different channels?
2. Make it relevant.
   Not every segment of your audience wants to hear about the same products or receive your message the same way. Adjust your content, timing, and channel to different segments of your marketplace.
3. Don’t be dull.
   In an effort to present every relevant piece of information, marketing materials can be outright dull. Spice it up. Take a different angle. Use interesting graphics. Develop fresh and interesting ways to present the information. You don’t want it to read like an advertisement or bore your audience to death.
4. Make it worth their time.
   You know what you — the marketer — are getting out of delivering your content. But what about your audience?  What do they get out of it? How does it benefit them?
5. Make is sharable.
   For email, mobile, and online content, create an incentive for sharing the content. When the coupons, event schedules, blog posts, or social media updates are shared by others they know, recipients see the information as more credible and they pay more attention.

Want more ideas for creating sharable content? Just ask!