fbpx
Connect with us

Subscribe

Azleen Abdul Rahim

Combat Your Competition With This Powerful Content Strategy

It seems you are playing the industry’s game and not your own. You know that if you keep on doing this, you will end up losing to deep-pocket competitors as the catching up work will never end.

In this digital era, you will find it extremely difficult to stand out from competitions. All the social media tricks that you have under your sleeves are all almost similar to those owned by the competitors. From copywriting of your captions, images, videos and infographics to engagement with audience and creating trust, you are well at par with the rest of the players. It seems you are playing the industry’s game and not your own. You know that if you keep on doing this, you will end up losing to deep-pocket competitors as the catching up work will never end.

How can I play my own game and win?

You’ve been asking yourself this same question day-in day-out without any convincing answers floating. Did you know that your branding and content strategy can eventually help set you apart from others? The assault could be much more powerful if you can revisit these two game plans and tight up all the loosing ends. These will help you to not only make your value proposition stronger by inviting your audience to participate more on all your social initiatives, but also make your brand to be easily remembered.

Work on your content deeper, not wider. By going deeper, people will notice whether you are a real deal or just another fake news. People can easily differentiate things today. And this is where your expertise will shout by itself without having to over exposing yourself too much. This is where your credibility is being acknowledged without having to put lots of effort to it. Boasting that you can do this and that by not really showing the real stuff can backfire. Your brand will become a disaster if you manage to create attention and eventually people come and give you their attention and you show them nothing after months or years of waiting.

How to go about it? Well, simply create your content by detailing out more in depth about that particular information that you wish to share and make it beneficial to people out there. The nature of the content has to specific and precise using easy-to-understand layman sentences and words. Ensure that the piece is authentic too. Keep on doing this and you will definitely get noticed. Please put a limit of your intention to sell, sell and sell. Instead work on sharing more. The selling part has to be done at your website and profile section of your social media. Those are the location you should work on your selling strategy, not at the social content.

Blogging and microblogging. You need to write. If you can’t write long form articles, you can microblog on your social media networks but you just have to write. Without writing you are as good as nothing on the world wide web. You are not searchable. You’re not discoverable and the worst part is, you’re a nobody. Period.

What is microblogging actually? It’s the social media caption that you always write every single day. And the caption is normally located at the top of the attached images or video. Now that is called microblogging.

The best to do this is by using the 80/20 rule. 80 percent of the time, you need to share simple, practical, beneficial and easy-to-understand tips on something related to you and your industry that make sense. The rest of the 20 percent, you need to soft sell. Get them to try out your cheapest products for example, subscribe to your newsletter, write a review of your latest product where they need to buy first, meet up for coffee or anything that makes them comfortable to do some actions that makes them a paid customer rather than stay as followers.

Play the right content game on each social media channel. You do not want to post similar type of sentences to all social media channels. Instead, personalise it based on what your audience can grasp on each of the social network you’re at. Facebook audience for example, is very much a casual audience who love to interact with their friends and families. You don’t want to post something ‘heavy’ here, they might not be able to grasp it as they are very much on their relaxing mode. They want to take a quick break from their daily personal and professional routines, so they opt to be on Facebook just to catch up on relaxing stuff. So your ‘intelligent’ content talking about ‘professional’ stuffs will definitely be ignored. Just post something lite and emotionally-engaged casual content, it will be okay.

LinkedIn on the other hand, is full of professionals, business owners, recruiters, investors and C-level individuals. These audience are here to acquire information on career perspective, more heavy duty information. Here, you can put any heavy and mind-gruelling articles, videos or ideas and your followers will respond to that in no time. They just love this kind of stuff. It’s what they are after anyway.

Twitter audience can take any. Just give them lite content and they will laugh or respond to you accordingly. If you share them heavy materials, they will be able to accept it and feedback you on that too. These people are flexible.

Instagram audience are more into visuals. So you’ve got to give them good, high resolution and quality visuals. Insert the right hashtags and location, you will see some responses towards your post.

Always observe the trends. Remember the keyword, observe and not blindly follow. The best way to observe is by reading articles related to branding, digital marketing, social media and content. Do this daily and you will see a pattern. A pattern of where the industry is heading and all the why’s behind it. While you are on this, see what is happening out there in the real world by observing how those large brands are doing it for their content strategy. Try to compare what you read versus what you are seeing. Are these tally? You may reach a conclusion from these observation. Use that conclusion to build your very own content strategy. Remember, there is neither right nor wrong strategy when in comes to Marketing. Yet it pays to follow best practices.

Always check on your competitors content, and make yours better. You don’t have to crack your head to find the best ideas in the world to beat your competitors. Try observe what they are doing, what type of content they are creating and why they are doing that. Find a conclusion from all these, then build a better version content out of those ideas. There is nothing more satisfying than beating your competitors out of their own game.

How do you make your content one notch up than those guys? One, make yours cleaner and easy to understand. Two, define your information in a more detail manner, make it very precise. Three, play with the right visuals. Example, make sure there are people in your images. People can easily relate to images with human beings inside it. Then, use Asian people and scene images if your market is in Asia. It pays to personalise your content. Similar goes to blogging, personalise it. And finally four, tell a story and share some how-to, tricks or something that they do not know.

Survey and suggestions. Some non-confidential ideas, options and plan that required a decision internally, do not have to stay internal. Get it out on social media. For example, you wish to ditch your existing corporate logo for a new one. In hand you have about 5 options which the management has to decide. Before the decision goes up there, why don’t you get your social media followers to give their feedbacks first. Get their help to suggest which one is the best to choose and why.

Stay human, stay authentic. It doesn’t matter whether you’re creating blogs, infographics, videos, GIFs and others for your personal brand or company’s, it’s very important to stay human and authentic. Copy and paste other brands’ content just to look professional before your audience’s eyes will only get worse. It is okay if your videos look slightly amateur, or your images are not taken by a DSLR camera, just let it out there. Just be yourself. Your followers will appreciate it.

Product reviews. You know, if those large brands out there can do this, so can you. Let’s just say you just release a product. Invite your audience to buy the most entry-level version and get them to test it out. Then encourage them to review it on their respective social media, with a hashtag. Do not forget a hashtag. It could be somewhat sensational and viral. Anything is possible.

Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Written By

Azleen Abdul Rahim is the Co-Founder of Marketing In Asia. He also runs NSE, a social media management company. Follow him on LinkedIn.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

5 Reasons Why You Should Hire SEO Services For Your Website

Marketing

Top 5 Digital Marketing Strategies For Startups

Marketing

Ultimate Guide To Write An Outstanding Content Calendar To Boost Social Media Engagement Of Your Brands

Marketing

3 Must-Know Tips To Improve SEO For Your Press Release

Marketing

Connect
Sign Up For Our Newsletter