Let’s analyse the first option of developing your content marketing strategy to earn audience attention based on The Diary Of A CEO, the fastest-growing podcast in the UK.

There’s a stellar content marketing strategy behind their growth. It applies easily not only to podcasts, but other content marketing formats, too.

The core of their content marketing strategy and storytelling is:

• juicy hook - pose a problem;

• draw them in - demonstrate your solution;

• cliffhanger - leave them wanting more.

How to approach this? The key is how can you make someone care. It starts with defining the topic and the main question why you’re dissecting it. That’s your problem. 

You then demonstrate how you would solve it with a few possible takes. To keep up  the engagement, you can do it through a lesson or an emotional rollercoaster. 

Give your audience enough, but not too much. Tease them in to engage and read or watch more. That's why you should end with a cliffhanger. Don't be clickbaity, leave some loose ends that draw in your audience. Let them know where your long-form content is, but don't push it down their throat.

Channels and formats are a crucial part of your strategy. The DOAC team has come to a conclusion on topics that perform well on different social media channels:

• Instagram - health, mental and physical themes, relationships;

• LinkedIn - work-life balance, career, entrepreneurship;

• TikTok - all the other crazy things. A great place to test out your ideas.

You must also realise where you want to grow. 

Is it a specific social media channel or your website? Here’s where formats come into play.

For example, if you want to grow inside a social media platform, you should aim to reach new people and keep them engaged for as long as possible. That’s where short-form content thrives. You can let your audience know where the long-form version is, but don't sell it too much nor direct them to it as the first principle.

Another brilliant hack to exploit your content is to produce as many short-form pieces of it as you possibly can. Let’s say you record about an hour-long podcast. What can you get out of it?

• 5 x 10-min clips for YouTube.

• 10-20 x 2-3-min clips for LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

• a bunch of 30-60-sec short-form clips for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.

Remember, each of your clip needs to have a beginning, middle, and end. Don't just use AI tools to cut random parts out of your story.

Short-form clips allow you to make deep dives on a specific topic or teasers. Depending how often you post, these can cover your feed for a month.

To analyse the content marketing strategy that focuses on trend hacking, let’s take a look at an industry pioneer, Ryanair. They had a very different approach to earning audience attention.

TL;DR: Michael Corcoran, ex-CMO at Ryanair, explains their brand strategy.

It relies on the following building blocks: brand perception, category, product, and social media content. They’re a disruptor brand in the aviation sector, offering low-cost flights. Their content marketing strategy focused on news-jacking - a marketing technique to weigh in on what’s hot in the media and get the reaction of a critical mass. Once done, the rest of the audience will follow and share their content.

With this news-jacking content marketing strategy, they managed to earn over 2 billion organic impressions in 18 months on social media. How’d they do that? Planning and dedication.

50% of the marketing teams’ time was allocated to implement this content marketing strategy. That’s a lot, but it delivered. They also had a 5-minute rule - if the marketing team wasn’t able to package the news in 5 minutes, they’d let it go and move on. They estimated that 5-minutes reaction time is enough to lose the first-mover advantage.

There are pros and cons to this approach. It’s a good way to stay relevant for a moment, but it comes at a price. Especially, considering how short the news cycles are today. Constant reactive behaviour can drain you out if you’re only producing content ad hoc. It also requires quite a lot of resources to jump the gun.

You need to be careful with what you say, because things can be taken out of context. It can end in a PR disaster. That happened a couple of times with Ryanair as well. But as they proved, the right timing and taking advantage of the momentum can get billions of views.

Okay, let’s talk Tesla.

Tesla has a one-of-a-kind approach when it comes to marketing. They’ve claimed to spend $0 on marketing in the traditional sense (TV, radio, prints, sponsoring, etc.), but in 2023 their marketing costs were $6.4 million. That’s still a drop in the ocean compared to other automakers. For example, General Motors spent $3.6 billion on global advertising and promotions in 2023.

Tesla’s focus is clearly on the product and placement. Getting earned media and organic impressions with PR instead of buying media and views.

With the release of Cybertruck, Tesla mastered the concept of FOMO through waiting lists. A few months before the car was released, they had almost 2 million people signed up for a pre-sale order. The buy-in was $100, making Tesla a nice buck of around $2 mln. Hats off!

Product-wise, they created a futuristic image around the Cybertruck. And it worked. I think that the famous tech reviewer, MKBHD sums it up perfectly in his cold open, “The most dangerous thing about the Cybertruck is the way it makes other people around you on the road behave.”

Screenshot from MKBHD’s video “Tesla Cybertruck Review: Already Iconic?”

Do you see what they did there? That video pulled together 4 million views in 6 months. $0 spent for millions of organic impressions. And that’s just a page from their book.

This approach to content marketing could work if you’re able to mystify your product. That can be tough for brands who are starting out. Nevertheless, adjusting these smart marketing hacks to your business can provide creative ways to market your product or service.

If you found this content useful, you should check out my post about the content creation shortcut to more views.

If you want to grow your brand with some simple hacks anyone can do, let me know. Get a head start, because many tech companies are missing out on this!

Are you ready to shift gears? I’d be happy to help you out with content marketing and social media strategies.