How to Get the Most Punch from Your Content

Content marketers must use words wisely to get messages across to consumers. Solid text-based marketing campaigns should tell a compelling story, keep it simple, and emotionally connect with followers of the brands.

When trying to reach out to people from all different backgrounds with marketing campaigns, it’s best to forgo an intellectual attitude and stay simple, writes Jeff Bullas of Business 2 Community. He cites Steven King, who writes that it’s not the words that matter, but how they’re used.

Bullas also says that “words take us on journeys,” and highlights just how captivating stories can be. Marketers, if they tell their own brand stories, can capture the customers’ attention just as effectively as a good novel would.

“Since small businesses typically have a unique story as to how they came to fruition, there is an opportunity to leverage pathos and create a similar emotional attachment to their brand,” says Washington Post writer Kenneth C. Wisnefski. “Simply put, telling their story can be a strategic approach to appealing to customers and establishing their own sort of emotional excitement.”

While Wisnefski recommends a feel-good story line, one that invokes a challenge and that promotes a call to action can work just as effectively.

“Telling a good story that has a negative part, a crisis, and a turnaround positive solution will make an emotional impact,” says blogger Patsi Krakoff.

That emotional attachment to a content marketing campaign should start with the headline to draw people in.

“On the social web with time-poor readers, making sure you write headlines that attract the first click are vital whether that is on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+,” says Bullas.

He suggests typing a headline into the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer to determine “how well received your copy will be to others.”

With the wealth of information there is for people to consume on the web, marketers can make their content stand out by following these guidelines.

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