What kind of content do you have?
Does it compel people to share it with others, or does it fall a bit flat in that department?
If you want to get more people to engage and interact with your brand and exposing your brand to untapped audiences, consider using share triggers.
Let’s take a look at some great share triggers out there and how you can easily incorporate them into your B2B content.
Why do we share?
Before we take a deep dive into how we can make our blog content more easily shareable to our peers, we should first take a look at why people share in the first place.
According to the New York Times Customer Insights Report (remixed by Foundation Marketing), people have five reasons to share content in the first place.
- 49% To bring valuable and entertaining content to others
- 68% To define ourselves to others
- 78% To grow and nourish our relationships
- 69% Self-fulfillment, to feel more involved in the world
- 84% To get the word out about causes or brands
We inherently want to be valuable to our friends, offering them information and insights which may be useful to them. This is one of the key reasons that some blog posts and other pieces of content get shared more than others.
Knowing that entertainment, establishing our identities, relationship nurturing, tribe building and cause praising are our primary reasons to share content, how can we compose the content on our sites to make it more enticing to share?
Here are several tweaks that you can do to your articles to make them worth sharing to others.
Study What’s Worked
When creating content for your B2B brand, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you pull out your keyboard. The first thing that you can do for your brand is to take a look at the articles that have worked in the field. What type of content gets the most shares, the most traction with readers?
This is one place where CONCURED excels. Our platform takes information from both you and your designated competitors and highlights what works out in the real world. What gets shared and what gets left in the dust? No longer does content creation have to be a guessing game.
The best part of the CONCURED platform is that it will offer suggestions on what you can do next with that information. Knowing what your competitors have produced, what should you produce that will be even better? Where are there some content gaps? That’s what we provide you.
Once you’ve studied what makes your competitors tick, you can get a better idea of what you can write for your own brand.
What qualities does the content have to have so it will be more shareable? We’ve gathered together some aspects of shareable content that will make your content creation much easier.
Generate Curiosity
Not too long ago, we talked about creating great headlines for your readers. One tactic that was briefly touched upon was the idea that you should generate some curiosity to help them read on.
Curiosity generating headlines are ones which play on your mind, compelling you to click to find out the answer. Here are some examples of curiosity-generating headlines.
Examples of Curiosity-Driven Headlines
- You probably won’t read this, but…
- 15 groundbreaking hacks you aren’t using in your…
- 17 people who came out in 2019 (you won’t believe…)
The trick is to use something which will generate interest within your readers and make them come over to at least see the show… even if they chose not to participate in the show.
Go Against the Grain
Here’s a news flash. It’s great to have your own opinion and set yourself apart from the rest of the crowd. Going against the grain means taking an idea which may not be popular among the zeitgeist and running with it.
For the sake of example, let’s say that you’ve got a lot of information which suggests that content may not be king. It might NOT be the end-all, be-all on a website. In fact, you’ve met several people who have made lots of money WITHOUT traditional content.
Let’s combine the curiosity-driven headline with going against the grain regarding content marketing.
Stop Content Marketing and Start doing this!! (Research reveals that this technique is 148% MORE effective than the Skyscraper technique!)
With appropriate marketing tactics put in place, this article would not only get a lot of attention but also a lot of shares. We’ve been hearing about how SEO is dead, living, and zombified… even if the target audience doesn’t read the article, it’s still shared.
Make it Usable
The content that you write doesn’t have to be a blog post. It doesn’t have to be an article, one in a series of articles designed to teach you the ins and outs of something that you enjoy. The content you create can be in the form of a checklist, a blueprint, or an easy to use how-to booklet.
This goes down and dirty to the idea of why you should have the content in the first place. Your sole goal is to be useful / engaging / helpful to your readers… enough to entice them to come over to your way of thinking and making them want to buy whatever product or service that you offer.
When you know your audience, you can get an idea of what tools and blueprints that you can offer them. For instance, we know that content marketers do IMMENSELY better when they have a content strategy in place, so we provide you with The Ultimate Content Strategy Guide.
Your clients will remember the times that you were useful to them and they will reward you with their attention and their dollars.
Simply Ask
You know how when you’ve just reached the end of a fantastic book and you’re a bit stunned as to what to do next?
The articles that you write should evoke the same emotion. Something that is good enough to break through the mental clutter and the fight for your attention. To leave you wanting more but satisfied with what was written on the page.
Anyway, it’s your responsibility to tell them what to do next. You may want them to look at your equally stunning content or you might simply say, ‘did this article help you out? Share it with your friends!’ to get the point across.
Make it Long and Strong
When you create a long article (most of our articles are on the long side, at around 1,500 words… there’s a reason for that), you are not only providing the search engines with more information to determine relevance, but you’re also providing more usefulness and more entertainment value to your readers.
For instance, let’s say that you’re running a travel agency that caters to business travelers. If you simply write a small article that outlines the joys of London, you’re not writing something that will truly capture the travel arranger’s attention. That type of generic article will usually land you around 500 words.
On the other hand, if you take the time to create a more in-depth article which not only includes the joys of London but pays attention to the prices of the hotels around, the costs of the plane tickets, and so on, your article is more likely to be shared because of the value that it offers to people within your niche.
There’s no ‘set in stone’ guidelines as to how long the articles that you’re writing need to be. We usually say that they’re just as long as they need to be, and no more. But, people are more likely to share articles if they’re thorough.
If we’re going to look at the entire content playing field, we’ll realize that there are a lot of brands that don’t get any traction in their marketing efforts. They’re running brand awareness campaigns, but they’re not actually getting the shares and likes that they would be likely to respond to.
What are you doing to make your content more shareable?