Page 45 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

6. Phone/tablet
7. Chef
8. Musical instruments
9. Industrials
10. Transportation and freight

There is an implicit hierarchy of conversation popularity across industries. If
you are in sports, entertainment, or any of the other industries in the first list,
there is an implied, fervent fascination with your content. There is something
that people find naturally remarkable about you that gets rewarded with content
transmission. If you’re in the second list or somewhere in between, you have less
of an organic opportunity for social sharing … not necessarily because of the job
you’re doing with your content, but because your products just aren’t naturally
conversational.

There is another option. If you’re in an industry with relatively low organic
reach, can you become remarkable? It doesn’t come easily or cheaply, but it is
possible, as evidenced by the series of “Will It Blend?” videos produced by
BlendTec blenders. A blender isn’t the most remarkable product, but the brand
made it so through its wacky challenge … ripping apart the most unusual things
(golf balls, iPhones) in its powerful blender.

One of my favorite examples of a company overcoming a low place on the
remarkability continuum is the Chipotle restaurant chain, which sells burritos
and tacos—nearly commodity products in the food business. Chipotle began
producing two-minute animated mini-movies telling a story of their restaurant as
an oasis of natural goodness in an otherwise bleak and dystopian world of
processed food. The first episode, a clay animation video with a soundtrack of
Willie Nelson singing a Coldplay song, was extraordinarily popular with
Chipotle’s youthful audience and garnered nearly 9 million views in a year. The
next year, the company went a step further by creating a free smartphone game
to go with a new video. It had 4 million views in the first week.

Reality check: All this was created to sell burritos. It wasn’t easy to become a
conversational brand. It wasn’t cheap either. But it worked, and Chipotle’s stock
and market share soared. That’s the nice thing about remarkability: You can
apply it to almost anything.

The key to finding your remarkability is to think about what makes you
surprising, interesting, or novel. In my book Social Media Explained, I suggest
that marketing strategy needs to begin by finishing this sentence: “Only we …”
That’s a tough task, but it’s the essential path to discover your remarkability.

In the case of Chipotle, the “only we” was creating a story of health and