#5 Format Variety for Attraction
The fifth rule that you need to remember when you are trying to become a successful content marketer is that it does not benefit you to stick to just one form of media. This is a mistake that many newer digital marketers make.
They generally feel most comfortable with one type of media format – such as text or video. This is understandable because not everyone can write well and many don’t feel comfortable being on camera or even having their voice on screen.
However, because your content is going to be used far and wide on platforms all across the Internet, it has to be capable of garnering the attention it needs to compete against other content marketers.
The only way you’re going to achieve that is if you can create your content in a variety of media formats to meet the personal preferences of your target audience as a whole. This is referred to as “repurposing your content.” No matter which niche you are in, you will have people who prefer text, video, audio or even images, like infographics, to quickly consume the information they need.
If you are only working with one media format, such as text, you might be closing the door on as much as 80% of your target audience if they have other format preferences. It may take a little time to get comfortable with the other formats so that you can repurpose your content into many different forms. Stick with it, your comfort level will come in time.
Previously, we talked about how humans have evolved with their preferences for content. Video content quickly became a strong competitor to text based content, as well as podcasts. However, recently people have begun to develop a preference for short form video over the more lengthy videos that require someone to sit for half an hour to an hour in order to consume information they need.
You can see proof of this when you look at how YouTube has been successful as the second most used search engine in existence, and now TikTok is growing rapidly to be a strong competitor to other social media platforms.
The videos on this platform range from 15 seconds to several minutes, with most users limiting themselves to 60 seconds to 3 minutes, max. You have to understand not just which media formats are gaining traction, but also how to use them.
While many people create videos using an editor like Camtasia for their YouTube channel, TikTok creators typically film their content directly in the app. They use trends and sounds, along with hashtags to strategically get eyes on their content.
If there is a media format that you don’t feel confident working with, you want to take time to learn the process and experiment with it. Once you go through the process a few times, it’s generally not as intimidating as you once thought and your skills get better over time.
You can also hire an editor to clean up your work and polish it to perfection. If you can’t afford an editor, there are also online tools that you can run your content through in order to make it read better.
#6 Share Your Content Everywhere
The sixth rule is to not be stingy with where you publish your content. You should be sharing your content far and wide so that you gain more exposure to your messages and expertise and are able to build a list and generate more sales.
Sometimes, digital marketers get intimidated at the thought of cross promoting their content over many different platforms. They only want to create a blog post due to their time constraints or their personal preference to not allow other platforms to benefit from their content creation.
However, the best way to master content marketing is to test the waters on a variety of platforms where your target audience is most active. Even if your followers appreciate your blog, they may spend more time on a site like Facebook, YouTube, or even listening to podcasts then they would clicking a link to go back to your blog.
Not only do you want to share your content that you publish on other platforms, but you want to make it shareable by others. If you initially publish a blog post, make sure you have a plugin installed that allows readers to share it via email and on other social networking sites.
You want to set yourself up on a systematic approach to your content publishing. For example, if you look at your publishing calendar and you notice that you have a blog post scheduled for that day, you should also have a system for sharing the post once it is published on the other platforms.
For example, you can take the link and a short blurb and share it on your Facebook page or in a group. This should take no more than a minute or so. You can quickly use a Canva template with a quote that you extract from the new blog post and publish the image on Pinterest and Instagram. Pinterest in particular is a great platform to share blog posts.
Next, you can repurpose your content and turn it into a slide show presentation or a video that you create with a few strategic excerpts and upload it to YouTube and TikTok.
Finally, you can use your blog post as a transcript and quickly read it as a podcast episode that you upload to a site like Anchor.fm, where they will syndicate it to other websites on your behalf.