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Catchy Content Marketing May Be Your Only Hope for Success

With the content marketplace filling up, if content doesn’t land – and retain – a reader, it’s been a waste of time and possibly money.

Every piece of content needs a unique angle, a hook or an interesting twist to make it stand out from the crowd amid all the content noise, digital or otherwise. It’s that smart or unique twist that makes content more relevant and worthwhile to an audience.
What’s behind the secret sauce to producing catchy content marketing? It’s about capturing the essence of a product or brand in an image, a video clip or a slogan of few words. It’s about making the ordinary appear remarkable. It’s about tapping into good karma, great timing and provoking the curiosity of the crowd. Catchy content marketing is about the unforgettable distinction that you, your product or service can promise.

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Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi likens it to a “content tilt.” He writes:
Your content tilt is what separates you from everyone else in your market area. It’s your unique perspective on your content niche, which creates an opportunity for you to attack, lead and, ultimately, own the category. Without “tilting” your content just enough to tell a truly unique story, you risk blending into the rest of the noise and being forgotten.
In the same way that songwriters labor to find an enticing instrumental or lyrical hook for their songs, content marketers need to find the inside sizzle or pop that will turn content into a eye-catching winner.
Here’s a lesson in timing and luck: Peter Shankman, a NY-based marketing consultant, speaker and author, brought a catchy content marketing ethos to an early project, back in the pre-Internet era. He noticed the overheated media hype around the 1997 release of the film “Titanic” and decided to have some fun with it. He had 500 t-shirts printed up with the words “It sank. Get over it.” and started hawking them around Times Square in NYC. To his surprise, he sold out his lot, and was able to set up a fast mail order business for the shirts as a result of media coverage he received.

Another example of catchy content marketing for today’s content marketing-branding practitioners comes straight from the Trump campaign. The candidate’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has achieved not only straightforward success as a memorable campaign slogan, but also crossover success of its use on a load of consumer goods. [To his credit, Trump owns the trademark on this phrase on its use for his campaign and on consumer goods. Read all about it over at Trademarkology.] Some ways to bring hooks and a tilt to content:

  1. Know the audience(s) well – Know what makes the audience tick. For instance, if a writer is targeting young skateboarders, he’ll have to use modern skateboard slang, know their habits, their language and their desires. Having all this information – and immersion – will make creating great written or visual content that much easier.
  2. Write great catchy headlines – For content writers, headlines are a great responsibility. Flip common headlines on their head, ask direct questions, and tease a situation (What if…?).
  3. Spin your content – Use a trending news story to put a different spin on a daily content piece. This might include leveraging topical news to give content the tilt it needs to make it catchy content marketing.

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