What is content shock?
Do you know what is content shock? The face of content marketing has changed a great deal in the last couple of years. The most fundamental change was the need for it as an absolute must for digital marketing. Every online brand, even offline ones, know the importance of content. This also means that every one of these brands are producing copious amount of content every single day.
Content Saturation
The result is what you expect to be. A saturation of content for the users is the issue here. Even if your content is of high value, you will rarely find any takers. The saturation level breached, the floodgate of content has opened up big time. There are too many pages of content written and published daily. Users are not ready for so much of content. This brings in what is commonly known as content shock.
Example of Content Shock
Take an example of content shock. You develop a first grade piece of content. You go through the motions of publishing, promoting and marketing it across the board. Even then, you find very few readers trooping in and only a couple of shares on Facebook or link retweets on Twitter. This is what we call Content Shock!!
What to do in case of content shock?
The question you end up asking: did I invest all that time and research to write a page that no one bothered to check up, even with all that aggressive promotion? Is it worth the time?
According to my experience, the threshold level of content to make a mark has hiked up to monstrous heights. With each passing day, the level shores up further. A page that can manage to get some views today, may fall flat completely if you hold back that page by two months. The quality of content is not really a factor here. The stakes are impossibly high.
What do you do in such a scenario? You cannot dump this form of marketing because there is no alternative. Research, among online users, shows that people are still game for excellent, value-added content.
In fact, with brands and interactions with those brands going completely digital, content is the only bridge between the sellers and the buyers. People are checking up online content banks more than ever! They want to read informative posts. The digital marketer’s nightmare is that they are simply too many of these posts!
Matters are a little better if you are working with an established brand with probably a strong offline presence. Here, the reputation of the brand rubs off on your content, pegging them up on a higher pedestal anyway. However, most digital marketers work for brands that are struggling to make a mark. For such content marketing teams, the going is so much tougher. You have to pull up your game big time!
Give unique surprise without being bizarre
For such brands (yet to find their feet type), the best bet is to spring a unique surprise. Develop an ad campaign or upload a video or infographic that bends the rules as everyone knows it. To cut through the clutter of online content, you have to be different without being bizarre. It is a very difficult balance to strike. You are almost certain never to get it right the first few times around. Again, this is your best bet!
The idea is to keep improving on your content. If you surrender meekly, you are not doing anyone any favor. It is my firm belief that with quality content with a soul, you can touch and move users. You simply have to be the best in the business.
So, to avoid content shock, dip into your resources. Think of some groundbreaking ideas to overcome content shock. Work harder than ever before. Brainstorm for ideas while having an eye on the competition. There is really so much more that you can do, over and above what you are doing right now.
Buckle up for competition in the content marketing arena.
Last time I checked, there were no seats for the also-rans!
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Nowadays, content is growing more than consumption. According to statistics, 66% of consumers will lose respect for brands who place ads near questionable content, and with 75% of consumers becoming concerned about the growing numbers of distasteful content, it’s easy to see why so many brands are beginning to question these big media platforms, so even if we come up with a different idea and maintain the balance between quality and different, it might not be fruitful specially when economy is in recession and a pandemic outbreak. How can we handle a content shock given the current situation?
Thank you Ahana for your insightful comment. Yes that’s the biggest challenge to be differentiate yourself out of the noise. What I feel that we need to keep balance of frequency of posting of new content and the high quality of content.
Another important thing to note here – you must update your old content of the website on regular basis. Content merging or content pruning is necessary for brands with proper redirection in place.
Also we should keep note that depending on content consumption of consumers on different platforms, brands should focus on creating platform specific content (Facebook content should not be same as LinkedIn content or Instagram content or website content)
For growing any online business and website meaning full content is very important.As I saw the many websites whose design is good every thing is look like Professional , but it is not growing and visible in online market only lack of Good Content. So, I understand very well after reading this blog, how much matter the Relevant Content for our Website, Blogs, and for Online Business.
To avoid content shock, proper structuring of page content is very essential. The page should content focusing on one topic and should provide well researched in-depth content with data, facts, figures, images, pdf, videos, podcasts, infographics or with interactive content. We call this mixture of content as hybrid content model. Your page should have clickable page sections for a better user experience. Also content formatting is important – proper spaces, bigger fonts and headings, meaningful notes, summary pointers, lists, how to steps, comparison , short paragraphs, right font size and colour, distance between 2 lines – all these things matter a lot.