Content that’s packed with great insights, useful data/stats and entertainment is considered as blockbuster content.
Whence the last time you loved a film technically but didn’t like the story structure? There would be many because what people want is a great storyline.
Yes, the other things do matter VFX, Cinematography, Acting, Direction etc. But all these things also tend to fall apart if the story is weak. The content is the backbone of everything. PERIOD.
You can construct a great website, but you can’t expect people to stay on the website for a longer duration, or revisit, as there’s no content to capture their attention and serve them useful information or offer them solutions to their problems.
To make it clearer, assume a situation where-
Imagine yourself as an entrepreneur who is going to set up a digital empire, but doesn’t know a thing or two about online marketing. You go online and search for digital marketing agencies. Some of the agencies’ website earns your sincere interest, and you bookmark them to explore further. After listing the potential partners, you critically see which site gives you more knowledge. All websites, except one’s content, look sloppy and don’t increase your knowledge or give you a solution.
The one that gives you the solution has great content that not only educates you about the online marketing scenario but also offers you the solution to create a space for your business.
Many marketers remain in their own fabricated universe that often serves them a great deluge. They consider a viral piece of content is a mere stroke of luck, or it’s truly hard to create content and assure of its massive success. Even worse, they think that it’s all a mathematical formula and voila! You have generated a viral piece of content.
These techniques sound good and somehow true but very often produce ineffective results. In most cases, it derails the marketing campaigns without ever producing real-time results.
Let’s see what some of the effective ways that can help you solidify your content, and can make you go viral.
1. A SOLID STORY ANGLE
It all comes down to how to present your story and how to approach the different technique that solidifies your content and engage the public in its awe-struck wonder.
There’s a good example of the film world. If you are a cinema lover and follow the film news, then you should be aware of how everyone praised Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception.’ The story was eminently complex, but during its entire run, the film justified its plot and didn’t lose the purpose of telling a complicated story in a very simple manner.
Inception’s cinematographer, Wally Pfister, is known for his amazing camera work and his technique of capturing the different angles to justify the story. When Nolan and Wally had to bring the story of Inception on the big screen, a lot of R&D was done, so it wouldn’t annoy the audience trying to understand the things and could resonate with a complex subject that wasn’t told on such massive scale before.
How the other dimensions in our dreams can be different and a glimpse of a different reality than ours had the audience at the edge of their seats, especially the Penrose steps sequence that sounded it had an edge, but it didn’t; a paradox it was.
Besides Inception,oaln’s othe Nr flick ‘Interstellar’ took us into the 5th dimension when Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) finds himself caught and tried to make contact with his daughter. How the time loses its purpose in space travel is one of the main USP of the film.
When Cooper returns from his space mission, his daughter Murph is old already and at the death bed, but the time had no effect on Cooper due to being in space. Singularity, where space and time become one.
In the technological world, G.E. is heavily investing in drones. They know that drones are the future and constantly pumping money in the industry to create a platform for their brand that would make them irreplaceable.
These days, people are hiring drone services in their marriages to capture better shots and story angles for impressive representation. In addition, G.E. sponsored U.S. National Drone Racing Championships to switch people’s attention towards futurist technology and to create an urge to own a one. In the future, people will own a drone-like they own smartphones.
However, preparations are to be done beforehand, when you want to do something big. G.E. and other companies, like Facebook that acquired Oculus V.R. Company, are loading their guns to enthrall people with a glimpse of the upcoming world.
In layman’s term, if you want to be a Pied Piper, you need to work on your story angle and present people a better content.
2. SHOOT BREATHTAKING PHOTOGRAPHS
Again going to G.E. example, the pictorial content transports people into another world and brings visibility and credibility overwhelmingly to the content. The video is a series of moving images captured at different frames per second.
The Hobbit Trilogy was a sheer visual delight by 3 times Academy Award Winning director, Peter Jackson. He used multiple Red cameras and shot the entire film at 48 frames per second that solidified the story, even though the studio and the producers stretched the small book into 3 long films.
If it weren’t the visual delight, then the film would have seen other fate. Hollywood big players, like Walt Disney, Warner Bros, and Universal etc. are pumping huge money into R&D to enhance the user experience of watching the films in cinemas’.
That’s how they lure people to visit the theatres; otherwise, why someone would pay $20 excluding popcorns and soda to watch the film when he can simply rent or own the DVD and still save a good amount of money left at the end of the day?
GoPro is another example that has revolutionized the photography experience. The company’s underwater camera captures flawless underwater pictures, and GoPro has adopted a similar model to market its product by creating an urge among people to go on an adventure, experience the thrill and excitement in the marine world.
Many companies are working on pictures and trying to create a good audience on Instagram, as people who love visual content spend more times there than any other app. That doesn’t mean you should ignore other platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, but when it comes to generating likes on photos, then I.G. takes the crown.
It’s time that you start working on your Photoshop skills, because not only real-time photographs perform better on I.G., but also the customized ones that you create from scratch on your digital canvas.
Online marketing is completely changing the scenario, and marketers are looking huge at the horizon with endless possibilities to create shareable and talkable content.
3. LEVERAGE YOUR EXPERTISE AND NETWORK
When you have to leverage your skills and influence the masses, why not you doing it? Many people are afraid of facing the negative remarks, and they build a universe of their own about the unrealistic situations that have existed only in their brain.
If you count yourself one among them, then leave all your worries aside, or simply curb them miles away, or bury them. Know that most of the things that you imagine never happen in the real world, including your nightmares. Hence, try to create short videos and pictures to give a better angle to your content.
The digital world is constantly changing, with companies facing new signs of change in technology. Right now, visual content is on the path to becoming a lethal weapon for the companies.
If you examine BuzzFeed’s Facebook page, then you would come across multiple verified BuzzFeed Fb pages for different categories – and one page is entirely dedicated to the videos to entertain and educate people.
As discussed earlier in the post, film studios are investing heavily to keep the audience coming to the cinema; otherwise, Media channels like BuzzFeed, Diply, UNILAD etc. are all ready to serve the public. Video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo are in great demand, and YouTube ranks second most visited website after Google, as it runs ads now, and people who know how to create addictive videos can earn a fortune.
4. Trendy Content
How can you hope to go viral when your content isn’t trendy at all. To create trendy content, firstly, you need to understand its nature. Yes, you can educate people, but you have to infuse entertainment that has the perfect balance of both; otherwise, it won’t go viral, will have the least chance of catching the people’s attention, outside of your targeted audience.
Sometimes, the videos that are universal go viral—for instance, a video Gangnam style posted on Youtube. The video was published by DanceGangnamStyle on Oct. 24, 2012, under the name ‘PSY- Gangnam Style,’ and so far it has gained 113M views, outranking most of the viral videos in the history.
If you want to go viral, then you need to understand the wants and needs of your audience. In the current depressed state of the world, people want to see some entertaining content that’s not so long and still force them to play it again-and-again.
It can be a picture of a person saving a dog, or yourself doing a charity and sharing it on Facebook to inspire. Basically, it depends on your level of understanding of how to create things for better vision.
If you allow your creative juices to flow, then nearly every industry, even the most boring looking niche, can create a viral video.
5. CHOOSE THE RIGHT MATCH FOR YOUR INFORMATION PACKAGING
There are several writing styles and more so the types in which we can present them. Knowing the best tool to use makes a lot of difference when addressing our public to generate interest and loyalty from them.
The majority of marketers are still stuck to the old ideas of a load full of text as an only method of informing the audience, but that’s not true. The need is to blend or go out of the box by presenting your idea to make it more appealing and unique.
Here are some of the routes (Content types) you can choose to reach out to your audience.
- Articles: You probably have news about the venture, product releases and a lot of other stories that deserve to be told. You can, do that through, in the style of a traditional newspaper or magazine which publishes papers.
- Audio: You can record oneself reading e-books, blog posts and lessons loudly, host audio, and integrate audio files with podcast plugins into your content.
- Case studies: A case study tells the success story of a customer who encountered it while using the product or service. They can take several forms, such as video or written word, and are clear testimonials that inspire prospective customers to consider your company when they try to solve similar challenges.
- Infographics: Infographics deliver research in an easy-to-understand, visual layout. Since they’re typically long and narrow, they’re the most-shared type of content, particularly because they’re naturally optimized for Pinterest.
- Blogs: Blog content can take a number of formats — how to, list, query, why, etc.—and is typically used to inform prospective clients. Blog posts are typically at least 1,500 words long, and help the readers solve a problem on their own, inspiring them to be impressed by what they’re doing (and then giving them an incentive to buy the product or service you’re selling).
- E-Books: E-books are a perfect way of breaking the long-form material into graspable sections. To repurpose your existing content, a simple way to start an e-book is to pick existing blog posts that flow reasonably together.
- E-courses: signups are a hit for today’s era and a sure short converting content; this is a vividly used method around the globe.
- Email Marketing: Email marketing is among the most productive ways of getting to the target regularly. This strategy, in its simplest sense, involves curating and giving your subscribers useful material.
- Images: Memes, animated GIFs, comics, cartoons, and even screenshots can all be valuable visual content, striking immediate attention from the viewer. Videos: Videos are useful for marketing purposes to showcase culture / behind the scenes, product demos, service overviews, product advertising, consumer testimonials and case studies, fan shouts, staff recruiting, pre-promotion activities, entertainment, education, about us and much more.
- Newsletters: Newsletters round out your latest news, news around a theme, or recent incidents occurring/coming in your company to offer a lot of interest in one piece of content to your audience.
- Podcasts: Think of this form of content as an informative or enjoyable way to meet your audience, distributed via outlets such as iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and Google Play. That provides a great way to meet the audience and draw them out of their hideouts.
- Presentations: Webinars, Meetups, Conferences, and other chances of speaking often require decks as visual aids. With SlideShare, you can easily repurpose and distribute certain presentations and address points. You can then embed that SlideShare in blog posts afterwards.
- Social Campaigns: A scheduled way of reaching your audience that has tactically distributed information shared at different timelines is what social campaign is all about.
- Webinars: Webinars are sort of like a lecture that you teach as an experience to the audience. You pick a specific time and day, advertise the event to your audience and usually host the webinar with a deck and speaking points.
- Whitepaper: White papers often describe the benefits that a prospective customer will gain from using a particular product or service from your company. These are most often used deeper inside the funnel to encourage a purchase decision prospect.