The Key to Killer Content

All my marketers make a lot of noise on social media, but I don't see it on the income statement.

This has to be the most common gripe I get from clients. A small business or a startup doesn't have the resources to throw around money in the hopes that their marketing strategy wins the lottery. They also don't like to hear about metrics related to "branding" or "influencer status." They want their content to do what everything else in their business is doing: Make money.


What Makes Content Cutthroat

Decent content makes sense. Good content tells a story. The best content tells your ideal audience something important they don't know. If you want your content to become cutthroat competitive, give them facts. You have to tell them a story around statistics they never knew. They will be grateful if you can teach them something they would be happy to share with people they want to impress at a cocktail party.

To do this, you have to scour the internet for information. It comes in many forms:

  • Facts from articles all over the web
  • Facts from social media
  • Research done inside sites for government ministries, government agencies, non-government organizations (NGOs), and nonprofits.
  • Data fetched from the internet by web-scraping data and finding the story it is telling
  • Data fetched from specific applications by web-scraping data using their specific APIs and finding the story the data is telling


What to Do with the Data

This is what separates the content to show from the content to win. The key to making content cutthroat is telling a story with the data you collect. Let the numbers guide you to the right conclusion. Expert opinion? We have plenty of that. Non-Expert opinion? There is much of that as there is air. But a story based on valuable information? This content both entertains and excites. This is the type of article that people read to the end. Like a rollercoaster, it's something nobody wants to get off in the middle of.


The ROI of Data Driven Stories

85% of content places the call to action at the end of the content. Unless your readers reach that point, they won't see it or do it. When you tell a story, people want to hear it to the end. When that story contains valuable information, they will read it through and through. That's what this blog is about. It's our journey to finding, scraping, and analyzing all types of data so we can tell the best stories that drive the bottom line of any business. All the time!

All the time!