words, that, sell

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF CONTENT MARKETING

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We often ask ourselves why the meeting industry’s content marketing tastes like bad wine from the supermarket. The lable promises a lot; however, the content lacks character and substance.

The debate about content marketing often revolves around theory and concepts; however, there are only a few colleagues who actually know how to use it. The situation could be compared to the times in the army when young men dreamt about having sex with the beauties from the town where they were stationed, and only a few managed to escape from the virtual reality behind the barrack’s walls and put dreams into action.

It all starts with very simple solutions. The most obvious lesson is offered by Google and its content marketing platform, which makes it possible to start listening to our customers. Various text optimisation programmes, which are used on WordPress formats, offer similar possibilities. I personally warmly recommend them to any meeting industry content manager. After several years of using analytics software it became obvious that in the case of creating stories the good old Pareto principle still holds true.

Therefore, the question is raised as to why 20% of stories have an effect and 80% do not, or in other words why nobody reads 80% of all stories.

For a start, it is useful to connect your brand with content marketing. In the good old times of Mad Man, and even today, a company slogan took care of that. Some good content marketing slogans can also be found among the meeting industry’s destinations. An example of that would be the Polish “Come and Find Your Story”. With such a basis it is not difficult to start telling stories.

[pullquote]And if we don’t start telling them, our competitors will.[/pullquote]

Words do count – and this was proven by Yale University long ago. In 1961, scientist proved that words have a magical meaning; among the most effective were: YOU … DISCOVER … EASY … PROVEN … SAVE … MONEY …GUARANTEE … HEALTH … HAPPINESS … LOVE … RESULTS.

We already gained some practical experience in working with our clients. Usually, we draw their attention to the following five rules, which must be observed when creating a story:

  1. LENGTH OF A STORY: Today, the acceptable length of a message is between 100 and 150 words. Unfortunately, over 60% of them fail to comply with this standard.
  2. STRUCTURE OF A STORY: A clearly structured story is composed of several key words and has a compelling title, an introduction, a main part and clearly indicated sources.
  3. TITLE: This is where the reader makes the first contact with your story. Therefore, it must be short, interesting and recognisable. The title is your story’s amplifier.
  4. CONTENT: Find stories that are interesting for your readers. Usually these are crystal clear, elegantly simple, inspiring and adjusted to the needs of your target audience.The most disturbing is simply listing all congress halls and services in hotel rooms – something that still happens too often.
  1. UEP – Unique Emotional Point: Only a few messages touch the hearts and feelings of their readers, although this is a basic element of a good congress story. The strength of feelings is a key element in achieving a positive reaction in our readers.

Deciding what should be left out of a story is equally important as what to include. What is important is to understand the needs of the target audience and their motivation. Every time try to imagine how your story will distinguish itself from others. Having said that, it is nonetheless best to leave the work in the field of content marketing to professionals, who do this on a daily basis and who have developed their own content marketing tools.

And now some word analytics! What follows are words, which were most frequently looked up by users of the kongres-magazine.eu portal in 2014. They were divided into four groups:

Words, which express POWER: PREMIERE – TRUST – IMPROVE – DISCOVER – LEARN – KNOW – UNDERSTAND – CREATE – TRUST – POWERFUL

Words, which become VIRAL: TEEL US – INSPIRES – DISCOVER – FIND OUT – WINNER – EVENT – SHARE – DEVELOPED – SEE – CHECK OUT – TAKE

Words, which provide SAFETY: AUTHENTIC – ANONYMOUS – GUARANTEED – LIFETIME – NO OBLIGATION – RESULTS – SECURE – TESTED – VERIFY – CERTIFIED – BEST SELLING

Words, which CALL TO ACTION: LIMITED OFFER – TODAY ONLY – ONLY 10 AVAILABLE – ONLY 3 LEFT – ONLY AVAILABLE HERE

In this article only a fraction of content marketing – a tool which will draw the attention of your readers to the content – has been presented. Only after having understood the basic principles of a good story’s effective structure can we meaningfully select the most appropriate ones for our company.

We wish you many good congress stories at the beginning of the new year.

 

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