The current era of viral content has businesses scrambling come up with new story ideas at the drop of a dime. Whether looking to increase shares, clicks or conversions, business owners in all industries are trying desperately to beef up their content strategies.
Most marketers gravitate toward content marketing as a cost-effective means to put their businesses and products out in the open. However, today’s ever-so saturated marketing sphere leaves many marketers spinning their wheels when it comes to new ideas. How can we possibly push our content forward if we’re stuck with writer’s block?
Thankfully, you don’t need to overhaul your entire content strategy to stand apart from the crowd. In fact, any business can leverage the classic marketing principles of urgency and scarcity.
Urgency and scarcity are staples of modern marketing, from eye-popping headlines to last-minute flash sales. The question remains: what exactly are these principles and how can you leverage them for your own content?
What Are Urgency and Scarcity?
Urgency marketing creates the sense that the amount of time surrounding a deal or topic is limited; meanwhile, scarcity marketing establishes the notion that the amount of time surrounding the deal or topic is running out.
Both strategies are staples of effective marketing psychology and can be applied to just about any business’ content strategy.
How to Build Urgency
Whether you’re a restaurant looking to reach out to new customers or a medical professional looking to grow your practice, urgency can be a powerful means of building interest around your content.
How?
- Consider drafting articles that focus on time time-sensitive topics (think current events, politics, or the popular practice of newsjacking) and focus on “breaking news” events. Although such content may have a relatively short shelf-life, it’s more likely to be shared versus the flavor-of-the-week blog post.
- Craft headlines and deals utilizing urgent buzzwords such as “now,” “hurry,” instant,” and “immediately.” Such terms grab the attention of readers and work to draw them into your articles.
- Stress the importance of your content (as opposed to your competitor) and why it matters now versus later. In other words, give your readers a reason to engage now instead of sleeping on what you have to say.
How to Establish Scarcity
Scarcity builds on a similar psychology as urgency; however, scarcity is based on your readers’ perception versus reality.
For example, if a reader is led to believe that an offer is limited to a certain number of buyers, they’re further pushed to spend. Scarcity marketing is prime for offering deals, especially during an email marketing campaign.
Headlines outlining a digital course with limited room for participants, for example, take advantage of scarcity as means to push users to sign up for an offer before space runs out. Likewise, you can promote a special deal that only applies to the first twenty or fifty buyers; therefore, users who sleep on your deal will miss out.
While urgency can be used to influence immediate user reactions, scarcity is perhaps the better means of getting users to buy, click or convert.
In short, urgency and scarcity can work to hack ordinary content that would be otherwise unremarkable to your readers. Whether you’re suffering from writer’s block or simply want to spice up your business’ content strategy, consider integrating urgency and scarcity as a way to revitalize otherwise ordinary content.
