The Flavor of Great Content
A moist, fresh, chocolate cake really does convey the concept of irresistible, tasty, satisfying content.
Think about that intense flavor for just a second. Diners don’t know it has vanilla extract, buttermilk, eggs, nuts, or the spices in it, but they may like that extra cinnamon icing on top.
If your web and social media content chokes customers like a dry pancake or stale bread, why aren’t you finding someone to make it something enjoyable which people will share with each other on Pinterest, Facebook, Linkedin or their blog?
Sumptuous, scintillating, addictive content is the most successful too. It responds to a deep need of consumers or B2B buyers. It soothes deep pain points and converts customers into excellent brand ambassadors.
It’s important to appreciate great content and the delicious flavors that your customers want to experience. Chefs get raving reviews, so why not your content too?
Improve your content, commit to the taste creation process and you’ll get results.
Weak Content Creates the Opposite Effect
It’s a sad fact that most businesses have weak, even unappealing content that ruins their brand and leads. That experience sends customers fleeing.
Content enrichment comes with a price tag and it requires expertise. Yet enriched content elevates the customer experience significantly and is more than worth the price. While Google generates a visitor, your content’s taste and flavor creates a sale and a customer.
It’s really important to realize that after you’ve poured big effort into your cake batter ingredients and baked it, that you realize that it may not be the cake they want. Taste is an emotional thing and doesn’t follow formulas well.
Content Enrichment = Enriching Your Revenues
Many restaurants can benefit with professional photos and videos that accentuate certain benefits. Vacation resorts as an non-food example, a short video of a golden sand beach laden with swinging palm trees, and pics of a swimming pool, hot tub, and comfy room can be the most effective sales generators. These activate strong emotions related to comfort, stress reduction, and adventure that drives purchases.
I can personally attest that Hotel SEO is more effective with professional high res photos, along with elegant copywriting. The photographers and copywriters offer a special form of enhancement you need.
Many clickthroughs happen because a website is more interesting visually and people do linger on beautiful travel photos. Image bearing blog posts gets liked, shared, and generates longer time on site too.
Visitors respond to rich visuals, interactives, natural descriptions and other improvements. A lot of people are visual learners and rely on visual flow to quickly assess the merit and significance of your content and immerse in the experience.
Gourmet chefs know the diner’s eyes eat first.
Enriching Your Content with Visuals
Vengage is a company that helps customers produce interesting visuals for their websites. They found about 85% of companies felt visual content was important to their content success. Here’s what their survey discovered:
Buzzsumo’s study found that content that contained at least one image per 75 words was most effective in generating social shares. Part of your content strategists job is to infuse visuals and other content enrichments to make it more appealing to social media users. Social media sharing is a big support for SEO and engagement. Rich, unique content is loved by Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin users.
You need better stuff, but possibly, you need to get rid of the stuff you’re using now. If it’s not helping, then it may never help. Don’t drag it along, because it’s likely Not working.
Enrich According to Strategy
Before you jump in to add visuals and zesty commentary, you might take a moment to understand what your strategy is.
Someone might say to you “your strategy needs a strategy.” I’m sure they’d be well meaning and it’s true for most of us that we could use more strategy. It’s strategy that guides the flow of ideas, points, stories, as well as customer progress.
“Developing the content in our content marketing strategy is developing the stories of us. It’s the big ideas that we represent. It’s the differentiated experiences we want to create.” — from the CMI Content Marketing Framework.
Focus on the Emotional Flow of the Visitor’s Experience
Your content should fit nicely into a flow that builds emotion, readies them to purchase and commit through your sales funnel path. From that perspective then, you welcome, orient, engage and lead them to your service/product. Wherever they come in, they need to be able to get to the funnel point they’re ready for.
Some content enrichment then, might be on your homepage, landing pages, menu or right sidebar on your page.
And in your blogs (since they’re generally your top landing pages), your engagement process needs to flow from there as well.
Changing the layout or rewriting your headings is enrichment. Adding a relevant high res photo can help the header area or in the 3rd paragraph to keep them engaged visually.
Then after they’re immersed in the content for 3 to 6 paragraphs, you might include supportive bullet lists and a quote from an expert. And near then end, after you’ve established your value offer, you can present a video that brings it into reality. Then advise on the next logical step. Enrichment serves to empower sales funnel progress.
Advanced Content Enrichment
Of course, a content and digital experience strategist takes it well beyond these basics. They would be drilling down to support specific benefits or significant emotions needed and focusing on them.
There’s usually 3 or 4 core benefits that must be focused on, because anything more tends to ruin the focus. Visitors can only hold so much in short term memory on it’s you better to make sure you’ve got the top ones emphasized. Less is more, right?
Content Enrichment Ideas
- videos
- high quality, unique and relevant photos
- attractive illustrations
- headings with keywords
- infographics
- stats and charts
- a new layout style
- specific product photos/details/offers (product content)
- numbered lists and bulleted granular points using colorful gifs
- pull quotes from influencers or industry authorities
- links to news stories or data that supports your claims
- stories
- photos of books you’ve written or ebook you offer as a downloadable
- customer success clips
- screenshots
- photos of you or important staff members
- social media posts
- interactive widgets
Using Content Enrichment Strategically
There’s lots of mentions of rich media online, but really the main point is about what is a rich experience to your visitors. Your enrichment relates to how the new added element ads to the flow of the narrative in your blog post or your website, builds emotional impact, and generates the desired action.
The chocolate cake photo in this post’s title helps to launch you into what’s become a savory subject. It’s best to stay on the food theme now. What’s next visually? Would a sumptuous cappuccino or latte hit the spot?
Videos as enrichment are popular however, will they pose issues that may actually ruin the overall impact of your content and damage SEO rankings?. Videos are a different medium and may disrupt and distract the visitor’s current emotional engagement. And even an irrelevant photograph can reduce interest, and a pull quote wrongly selected can disrupt the flow of their thought and intent.
Good editing can fix all of these issues.
Enrichment should:
- deepen impact
- add personalization and build significance to them
- sustain interest and engagement
- build emotional impact surrounding specific benefits
- build credibility and trust
- empathize with customer’s pain and reinforce their need to purchase
Original Content is Always Best
Be more aware of your content assets. Don’t let old blog posts die in obscurity, and reuse those great photos you have in your WordPress media library.
If you have some content that is a cornerstone of your content strategy (top blog post) reuse it. That’s why refreshing your content is wise. It gains more Google ranking power too.
And your original branded infographics, key product video, or original photos can generate significant impact. One of my clients has photos of their staff attending major industry conferences. These photos communicate some impressive benefits: team commitment, significance, active promotion, branded merchandise, educational events at the conference and industry notables, and much more. These pages convey more about the attractiveness of the company and its brand more than a video or product shot. It’s active, unique, original, and has many rich dimensions.
Interest in those industry event pages surpasses all other content on social media. And when people search for industry events on Google, my client’s website dominates that topic.
That’s enriched content that can be infused into regular blog posts and marketing pages.
The economic recovery is underway and this is the right time to begin strategizing better content and using advanced Search engine optimization to get it delivered to your audience. Without reach, you content cannot achieve its true power.
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