Reading Time: 2 minutesWe often say that a marketer’s job is to create impact and add value to the customers’ life. While focusing on customers’ acquisition, marketers must also keep an eye on retention, analyzing what’s going on and finding new ways to acquire and retain new and old customers.
The diversity of online and offline channels makes everything harder. In a highly competitive environment, we don’t only fight for clicks, we fight for attention. And that’s precisely the most valuable thing we can get in exchange for what we share.
Given my personal background, I tend to believe that the most valuable kind of content is the one that educates and informs. For me, that’s the kind of content that gets people’s attention and creates the bigger sense of gratitude that, in the end, makes people come back.
On the opposite side, I also agree that the educational content is the one that is harder to read. Usually, they come as long blog posts, long videos, and e-books. I still believe that these contents are great, but when we use them we have to be extra-careful, so we make them easy to read and visually appealing.
But, how do we adapt our content to make it more readable?
A few years ago, Smart Insights and First10 launched the content marketing matrix, a framework for content, organized by area. According to them, there are four kinds of content, which we can translate in four ways of adding value: Entertain, Inspire, Educate and Convince.
While the matrix is extremely useful, there’s one thing about content that makes it so fascinating: you can edit it to bring it closer to one axis.
So, imagine you have a trend report, which is clearly an educational piece of content. How can you adapt it to make it more entertaining or convincing? What if you used a different visual language? What if you make a trend report less boring? The same thing can be done in the opposite order: imagine a case study (which is a convincing piece of content) and make it more educational.
Inspire as a way to open the door
Do you know those inspirational images and quotes that we all love to hate? Usually, they tend to have a better CTR, than the educational and convincing content. That happens because they’re like content fast-food: you eat them fast and they look really great. Shouldn’t we have used them? Of course, we should. Personally, I believe that all kinds of content should be used.
In opposition ton educational content, inspiring and entertaining content are great ways to start a conversation. In fact, they work fine if you’re trying to get people’s attention and make them interact with you for the first time. After that,
