Partner Article

What is Creative Content and Why Should You Embrace It?

SEO turned into link building, which evolved into content, which is transforming again into a more creative realm.

While many businesses who aren’t fully au fait with the interchanging world of digital marketing; word count, SEO and keywords are still the challenges that they think need to be overcome.

Let’s get one thing straight – you don’t need to address these points. I mean sure, keep them in your mind but take the time to really understand the tactics that you should be using in your digital marketing and PR strategies. Yes, links are and will always be a critical part of search engine optimisation; but old school SEO relied on quantity and links began sprouting up all over the place.

Links placed on irrelevant sites, in ‘comment’ sections, placed randomly in a poorly written article will do more harm than good. Google Penguin will penalise you, and your audience will be reluctant to trust the brand, ultimately – the time spent building these black hat links will be ultimately unprofitable.

So for the past couple of years we have seen content marketing boom; lengthy, in-depth and well- written articles have been produced in order to be placed on relevant sites. This strategy was developed with the goal of engaging with audiences, sparking their interest and inspiration, be used as reference material and capture the attention of industry influencers who would share the articles further.

This has worked well; the articles and features that have been produced are authentic and educational, proving value to readers and complying with the Google algorithms monitoring the content linking back to your brand.

While these written articles and features still hold a lot of value, and should remain at the heart of your marketing strategy its creative imaged-based content that is taking centre stage. From memes, gifs, infographics, photo led press releases and quiz’s – there are many avenues that you can take with creative content.

Of course, before you begin you need to decide what it is that you want to achieve; is the creative piece just for fun and to raise brand awareness, is it to be educational – or entertaining, is it telling a story? Before you begin the creative process, you must be sure of the purpose of the piece and how you want your audience to engage with it; do you want to them link back to the piece or do you want them to share it? To determine the difference between link worthy content and shareable content, you should watch this video from Steve Rayson of Buzzsumo.

But why is creative content so important? Because it’s image led. By now, we’ve all heard the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” – but contrary to popular opinion; the saying does hold some weight. Images are deeply rooted in our psychology, in fact – 93% of communication is non-verbal. So how a business uses images will affect the perception of the brand – neuromarketing has also reported that visual content drives engagement.

Our brain process images far quicker than they process text – 60,000 faster to be precise. Using colourful image-led content will not only be more appealing to the human eye because we automatically focus on the variations, but the brain is also more likely to retain the information that the image is portraying. Content with images or videos receives 94% more views than content without images, and 93% of people say that images are the number 1 deciding factor when buying a product.

So how can your business use creative content? First of all, research the content that your audience engages with best, the purpose of the piece and the placements that you want it to achieve.

Once you have put together this information, you can gather the ideas for the piece. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a static piece of content, and making creative pieces isn’t as difficult as you might think. In order to get the best creative ideas from your team, creative culture is incredibly important, an environment that is conducive to creativity is one in which employees feel supported and not hindered by resources, deadlines and management.

Chris Hardy from Xchange Training gives us his views, “The digital and creative industry is incredibly fast paced and in order to keep up you need to not only be on the ball, but almost one step ahead of the game. We’re often told we should never stop learning and for creatives that statement rings particularly true. Whether your job involves the latest creative training or it’s something you take up in your own time, you’ll certainly see the value both professionally and personally from expanding your knowledge and investing in a training course.”

If you are unsure about creating your own graphics, why not opt for video guides and tutorials that can be placed on a YouTube channel. With social media implementing auto play, Snapchat exploding in a way that no-one expected, and Instagram bringing in their snap video feature – the opportunity is there! 61% of businesses are already using ‘social’ video in their marketing strategy and Cisco reported that by 2019, video will account for 80% of global internet traffic.

Don’t be afraid to test the creative content that works best for your business. Experiment with infographics and quiz’s that have the ability of achieving top tier placements like national press, create memes with entertainment value to achieve a high number of social shares and make instructional videos that can be placed on multiple platforms; testing various strategies will ultimately show you which ones drive the most engagement.

Advertising agency http://www.everywherebrand.com/Everywherebrand said it best when they said, “Only radical creativity can deliver the experiences that make people want to look, want to read, want to listen, want to engage with brands”.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rebecca Moore .