Page 41 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

With this perspective, you begin to see that getting people to transmit your
content through their network can’t be reduced to SEO techniques or get-rich-
quick schemes to drive massive traffic to your website. Shareability requires
connection of some kind; your content must fill a need or perhaps even reflect on
a trusted relationship.

The primal need

Sometimes, content goes viral due to luck. There are millions of cat videos. Why
do a few become a hit? There are millions of kids singing songs on YouTube.
Only a handful of them truly ignite. Who knows why?

I don’t think you should build a business case around getting lucky. Instead,
you need to look at some of the techniques you can apply over time to give your
content the very best shot at transmission.

Most of the value created on the social web every day is non-economic. Do
your friends wile away their hours on Facebook to be more profitable? Of course
not.

Emotion is a huge driver of social sharing. People share when they feel joy
but also when they feel afraid and uncertain. In an analysis of the IPA
dataBANK of 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, the cases
with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31 percent versus
16 percent) as those with only rational content.5

Individuals get the most benefit from participating in the social web for
intangible, emotional, psychological reasons. The addictive nature of this place
is born from a primal need for connection, storytelling, commiseration, and ego
… not personal financial gain.

In his book Fizz, word-of-mouth marketing expert Ted Wright concludes that
those who ignite content are intrinsically motivated. “Influencers share stories
because they want to build bonds with people. For them, that is the reward, and
it comes from a place deep within them. If they think what you’re selling will be
interesting to people they know, that is all the motivation they need. You cannot
buy their interest—or their approval—with discounts or rewards.”

Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Marketing, takes the idea a step further:
“Marketers talk about all these really clever ways of creating content, more and
more content … really imaginative ways of creating a diverse array of content
types with nominal resources, and nowhere in these discussions do they ever
really say anything. The most important characteristic of content marketing
today is not quality or quantity. It’s insight. And that is the differentiator lacking
almost everywhere.”