Let’s get one thing straight: It’s ‘Trick OR Treat,’ not ‘Trick AND treat.’
Many were those happy Halloween days when you donned a white sheet or a princess gown and heels to stalk around the neighborhood in search of sweet, delicious candy. You strode to the door, pumpkin basket in hand, to meet the smiling gift givers on their front porch. A ring of the doorbell, the squeak of a hinge, and finally you’re ready to scream the all-powerful words.
“Trick or treat!”
Even if these magical Halloween days are long gone, that simple phrase has stuck around with you for a long, long time. As it should! The basic concept of trick or treating is that you’ll be met with one of two things. Either someone will drop a Snickers bar or two into your candy plunder pile, or you’ll get the depressing reward of nothing at all. Getting candy is the hopeful outcome of the trick or treating schema, and even an expected one too.
And it isn’t just the neighbor kids that expect to get value from you this Halloween. It’s the entire audience behind your content marketing efforts.
Creating marketing and social media content for your brand should involve a lot more than just words and emojis, or the ‘boring’ things that everyone else is doing. In fact, if you aren’t offering value-driven content instead of ‘content for the sake of content,’ your strategy might not even blip on the ROI detector once.
Why does value matter so much to a successful content strategy, and how do you ensure it stays that way for the fall and beyond?
Let’s Look at the Numbers
Do you click on things that aren’t valuable? Probably not. Neither do 59% of shared links on social media that fade into oblivion. And don’t even get us started on clickbait articles, or web content that uses manipulative headlines or images to pull in clicks and readers without delivering value. In other words, these posts use tactics to bait their articles with false promises of value which end up being a farce after reading the post. These empty, value-less posts make up as much as 33.54% of mainstream media outlets, according to a 2017 study done by the Universities of Mississippi and Oklahoma.
Clickbait might be a pretty crummy way to retain an audience, but a directionless ‘hive blog’ can be even worse. If you’re mindlessly churning out content about your products and services without passion or a value constant, you’re doing it wrong. If something doesn’t change fast, odds are you’ll be wasting your time writing for an audience that’s just not impressed.
Remember, it’s trick OR treat. Give your audience the sweet results they’re expecting. Don’t trick them into grabbing a strong hook and fail to deliver.
Feed them and Reap
Continuously feeding your audience with value will curate a brand loyalty pivoted on value and trust. One of the best ways to capture this formula is to turn the idea of value into, well, a formula.
What You Get / What You Give Up = Value
This can also be translated to:
Treat / Trick = Halloween
Let’s look at this a little closer. ‘What you get’ is equal to the ‘treat’ side of the Halloween equation. Each one of your customers will have a unique outlook on your offerings that will guide their decision-making process. Maybe they really want a KitKat bar in their pile. Perhaps they’re a huge fan of Twizzlers. The point is, whatever your audience wants to see is what you should offer. Articles that bring them value, deliver on their promises, and do more than just generically fill out the blog’s ‘recently posted page.’ Get creative!
The ‘what you give up’ portion of the equation is equal to the ‘trick’ side of our Halloween theory. This tenant applies both to you as the content strategist and to the people who follow your work. What time, money, brainpower, or other valuable resources go into creating content? What goes into reading and sharing your content as an audience member? If you work out the equation right, your value (or Halloween) score should have a high result.
Taking the Next Step
2019 is the right year to inject value into your content efforts and build a value-driven strategy that all your trick-or-treaters will love. Ready to take the leap?
Meagan S. stays current with best SEO practices and keyword rankings, but most importantly realizes that the written word is made for people, not robots. Experience the personal touch that Meagan’s writing brings, with smooth-flowing and simply genuine prose that captures your vision perfectly. Meagan is no stranger to hard work. Maintaining a 4.0 GPA throughout college, she consistently provides value and excellence in her full year of writing professionally. She brings speed, consistency, and a researcher’s heart to every assignment given. She has high standards for herself and her craft, and prides herself on a strong work ethic.
