Children’s books are fascinating. They have a magical ability to draw you in time and time again. At the same time, their simplicity is something kids and grown-ups can appreciate.
Now, if only your target audience could say the same thing about the content you publish about your brand and products. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
The good news is there are several techniques used in children’s books you can apply to your content so you can reach your content marketing goals.
Content Marketing Lessons from Books for Children
Here are five of the most valuable content marketing lessons children’s books teach that you can start using.
Lesson #1: Be Timely and Timeless
Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne were both published decades ago. Yet, they continue to fascinate children today. The reason? Many things shared in these books are just as relevant today as they were when they were first published.
The same thing is true with your brand’s content. If you want your content marketing strategy to bring in site traffic and generate leads continuously, you need to focus more on creating evergreen content.
Evergreen content includes in-depth material with information relevant and applicable for a very long time. It contains answers and solutions to your target audience’s most frequent questions and challenges.
At the same time, you also need to be timely with your content. Take advantage of current content marketing trends when creating your evergreen content to make it more appealing to your target audience.
Lesson #2: Keep Things Simple
Children’s book authors use simple words and short sentences when they write their stories. That’s because children have a more limited vocabulary than adults. Writing in this fashion also makes sure children not only finish the story but also understand the message.
Adults understand more words than children. However, their attention span is still short, especially when they’re online. The attention span of adults today is only eight seconds. That’s shorter than the attention span of a goldfish!
Now, that doesn’t mean to throw out long-form content. In fact, long-format content is preferred by people and search engines. One study shows blog posts and articles averaging 1,890 words land on the first page of Google.
Instead, practicing brevity in your content makes it easier to read. As a result, your readers get hooked on your content so they thoroughly read through your entire material.
Using content writing tools like Grammarly and Hemingway help. These tools review your content and highlight grammar mistakes as well as sentences that are difficult to read. That way, you can efficiently edit your content, so it delivers your message without compromising the quality of the information you’re providing.
Lesson #3: Teach Something Valuable
One typical characteristic children’s books share is that they all teach a lesson to their readers. Some are blatant like in the case of Dr. Seuss’ book Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? Others, like Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand, need a little bit more digging.
In the same manner, you need to make sure your content provides solutions and useful information to your readers. At the same time, you also need to give them some actionable tips and pointers so that they can apply and see the result promised in your content.
Lesson #4: Don’t Skimp on the Visuals
Most children’s books are full of colorful pictures. One reason for this is that people remember 65 percent of the data they see in visual content even three days after seeing it.
So it’s important to make sure to include relevant visuals to your content.
Aside from making your data more memorable, visuals also help make it easier for your readers to understand.
Visual content like infographics can also make complex products easy to understand. It’s a lot more interesting presenting the benefits of using your product in an infographic than just typing them out as an article.
On top of that, people are more willing to share visuals on social media than text-only articles.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can just upload random stock images. Visuals must be relevant and related to the information shared in your content. Original visuals work best with 41.5 percent of marketers saying they prefer creating and using unique visuals in their content. These include data-driven infographics, graphs and charts.
Lesson #5: Get Creative with Your Content Marketing
Because of the immense volume of content available on the internet, creating high-quality content isn’t enough. You need to find creative ways when it comes to producing and distributing your content so it can get the attention it deserves.
One way children’s book authors do this is to approach a topic or theme from different angles. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, for example, teaches the lesson of giving by telling the story of the selfless generosity an apple tree offers to a boy, instead of the other way around.
Buzzsumo is a great tool here. It gives you a list of the most widely shared content based on your chosen targeted keyword as well as their evergreen score.
Children’s books are meant to teach and entertain kids. However, as we’ve seen, they can also teach marketers a thing or two about content marketing. The best part is that you can quickly apply these lessons to your current strategy to help you reach your goals.
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