Your content competes with Donald Trump today – Asia Professional Speakers Singapore

Love him or hate him, since Donald Trump became the 45^th President of the United States, our social feeds are even more chock-a-block than usual with the latest antics, tweets and executive orders from 45 and his administration. Not just that, there is content to cover every action; content on how to cope emotionally with the action; and content to make us laugh too.

It’s a veritable avalanche of content!

My content preference is always the funny or heart-warming stuff – it keeps me sane – but right now, this Trumpian avalanche is keeping me completely distracted from the business information I usually read every day. I know most of my community is in the same boat.

I used to present Kim Kardashian as an example of content marketing distraction. But she has definitely been surpassed by an even bigger distraction. President Trump. If you step back and think about it, this flood of content has become the real competition for content marketing. Any information (global or local) that distracts us every day.

But in Trump’s case, it’s even bigger than that. Let’s look at the numbers referenced in this NY Times article: I Ignored Trump News for a Week. Here’s What I Learned.

My key take-aways:

He could find almost no Trump-free press
“Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever”
“He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not”
It’s not just that Mr. Trump’s coverage beats anyone else’s. He is now beating pretty much everyone else put together – according to Paul Senatori, chief analytics officer, mediaQuant. Essentially, based on the paid value of media coverage on (or related to Trump) he is essentially surpassing the next 1,000 most covered people. Think about that!
He’s 90% of the news but not 90% of news
Every story that shows any signs of life on social media is copied endlessly by every outlet, so if you’re sharing Trump stories of any description, you’re adding to the situation
Finally, there is no escape!

It’s a crazy time and it’s not going to diminish anytime soon either. We know we’re in for more and it’s an intense ride for many of us.

But this isn’t about politics

This is about the playing field for content marketing. This is about the reality our customers (and all of us) are facing right now. This is about cutting through the noise and getting your customer’s attention. Because every piece of information created today is competition for your customers’ eye balls.

Your competition isn’t the competition. Every piece of content that is created is the competition!

No matter who your customer is, what field you are in, whether you are B2B or B2C, all customers are human beings (for now at least) and they are interested in a whole myriad of issues and topics – whatever side of the political divide they’re on.

To cut through and get their attention – now, more than ever – the quality of your content must be so amazing, it earns the right to their time, based on how they are spending their time interacting with the world.

Let’s face it, if anyone was trying to get my attention in the last few months, good luck, because anything targeting me would need to be so amazingly good (or funny) it was capable of distracting me from what was already distracting me. The world.

Same for you?

Creating great content isn’t just about this unique time in world history. We need to think about content marketing like this all the time, and it starts and ends with amazing content.

Passionate, relevant, unique and insightful content that inspires your customers to achieve more, learn more or be more. Content marketing is for them, not to sell you. The selling you part comes if you do the quality content part first.

We’ve got to shake things up

We hit content shock in 2016. Too many businesses finally got on board and started creating more content (three times more), but it hasn’t been working – Report: Marketer Content Tripled in Past Year, but Engagement With It Stayed Flat. The reason? The content wasn’t good enough. It was essentially same same.

True content marketing is obsessive. It never stops serving the customer. It’s centered on a passion for helping the audience. It’s about them. Its goal is to help and by default, build loyalty. Do it brilliantly, you’ve got customers for life.

But it’s hard work. It takes resilience, persistence, failure, and probably the worst – being surrounded by doubters and critics.

The person to lead content marketing must have a LOT of guts during this period in content marketing’s evolution. And patience. They definitely need a lot of patience, especially when dealing with the same old criticism being flung at them again and again and again. I know, I’ve had a decade of it.

Quite simply, if there’s no heart in the content you create as a professional or for your brand, and it’s only being done because you must, engagement ain’t going up – that’s for sure.

Review your content – does it leave you breathless and gagging for more? Does it align to what your sales team are telling you or with your own customer conversations? If you don’t think it achieves that, time to rethink your strategy.

And please – the problem isn’t content marketing, the problem is poor content. Content marketing done brilliantly builds businesses. It’s built mine and it’s built many others. It can build yours.

Let me know if you agree or disagree? I’d love to have a conversation.

Cheers

Andrea

Editorial credit: Donald Trump by Shutterstock, Inc.

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