Your content matters more than ever. The quality. The focus. The voice. It all helps to differentiate you from the many other voices in your space. And in this time of information glut, that can be the difference between winning and losing the attention of your audience.
There is a new and controversial theory out there, Content Shock, defined by Mark Schaefer, that goes like this:
“The emerging marketing epoch defined when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.”
Numbers speak, and what this phenomenon is describing is the unprecedented volume of content that is being generated every single day – 27,000,000 pieces of it. To put that in perspective, at the rate we are currently producing content, depending upon which study you choose to believe, we are doubling the web-available content every 9-24 months.
Take a second to digest what that implies.
Consumers, on the other hand, are quickly reaching a threshold of content saturation due to a finite amount of personal bandwidth, ie available waking moments in every day. They simply don’t have much more available processing space for new information.
For the first time in web history the supply of good (I know, relative term, but whether it’s good or bad content takes up space/bandwidth) content is greater than consumer demand. And from an economics standpoint, we all know that when supply exceeds demand, prices fall and other market forces kick in to adjust and re-balance the environment.
What can you do about this? Follow the guidelines we have shared since we began talking about content and the importance of generating solid, relevant, interesting and compelling reading for your audience. Given that you probably don’t want to read back through every article we have ever written on the subject, a summary follows:
- Be your bad self. Now is the time to identify what makes you special as a business and groom that concept. Put it out there in your blog articles and social media posts. Find your very special voice, one that differentiates you from your competition and develop that until you become the local authority on what you care about.
- Make influential friends. No we don’t mean you have do a House of Cards manipulation thing, that would be icky. But identifying a few players in your space that have a voice that resonates for a sizable group, then making friends with those players and asking them to contribute to your blog and offering up helpful expert tips and tricks that they may choose to incorporate in their work will go a long way to keeping your head above water in a choppy sea.
- Create content that your audience will want to share. It’s no secret that when we read something of value, we tend to share it with others. I do it all the time because a good piece of content discussing a topic that matters to me and mine is worth sharing.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel every time you need a piece of content. SpaBoom created our content system to intelligently leverage each and every piece of hard work you do. Write an article and you automatically generate two social media posts. Easily generate an email linking back to a blog article that you’ve written (that also contains a link to your instant gift certificates page – a transactional opportunity). Every time you sit down to create a piece of content, know that it can be sliced and diced and artfully applied in more than one place. One piece, many products.
You are in a unique position to really decide what you want your business to represent. Once you have nailed that let the message that works for that idea flow through every single piece of content you generate, from your website content to your service menu descriptions to your blog articles to your social media posts to your email marketing campaigns.
Competing in a noisy market isn’t for the feint of heart, but with some thought and careful planning you’ll be ahead of the competition if you take a deep breath, stay calm, and find your voice.