3 Ways to Get Creative With Sniply and Stand Out From the Crowd
May 11, 2021Let’s face it: online marketing can get a little bit boring. It is so data-oriented, so techie and so serious, that it barely leaves space for some good humor. Think of all the tools you use for your online marketing efforts: they are all about measuring and automating. How many of them help you express yourself and your brand in a creative and special way? Almost none.
When I first saw Sniply, the first thing I noticed was its humorous and creative potential. The amount of smart tricks that you can do with it is almost infinite. If used wisely, with a bit of spice, it can help your branded links stand out from the crowd of lousy content by presenting something edgier.
To pay tribute to Sniply and the change it has made in our marketing efforts, I wanted to share three fun ways in which we use it. Enjoy!
1. Be the funny sidekick
The world of content marketing is notorious for its lack of creativity and for constantly spinning around the same buzzwords. In this world, it is hard to write something outstanding and innovative and actually stay alive.
If you follow content marketing blogs, you know what I’m talking about. When was the last time you read an article with truly groundbreaking insights? They are basically repetitions of the same clichés that have been around for the last decade. The situation is even worse on the social media, where all the content marketing spammers post the same articles around the clock and make our news feeds a complete mess.
The practice of “not being creative” is not only popular – it is even encouraged. The almighty Hubspot devoted a whole blog post on “How to ethically steal other people’s content”, and KissMetrics published a post under the title “No content? No problem! Utilizing other’s content to boost your own strategy”. As we can see in the example of these two highly influential blogs, content marketers took the concept of sharing a step ahead, and now just recycle themselves to death.
Now, if you’re going to join the choir and base your content marketing efforts on recycling content, how about at least doing it with a smile? It’s simple: share relevant content from other websites, but steal the attention of readers by kicking ass with a funny, sarcastic or curious comment using Sniply.
Did you check the link to Hubspot’s article I just talked about?
I did this little trick for the first time with Greg Verdino’s article “Nine content marketing tools your competition isn’t using”. See? A little back-riding on Verdino’s successful article, and…ta-dam! It’s free promotion for my website. Thanks, Greg!
Just to make it perfect, a little sassy tweet, just to make sure that he sees what I’m doing, and the joke is done.
This trick is a bit cheeky, but when you think about it, it’s really harmless. Everybody gains from it: I, of course, got clicks on my Sniply CTA and visits to Boost the News’s landing page. Greg Verdino himself also gained his share – in the end, I did share his article, didn’t I? He seemed to get the joke, because he did “favorite” my tweet, so no hard feelings here.
2. Be the master of your domain
When you play the sidekick with Sniply, there is one more winning side to this game: your prospects. When you pick carefully the websites to which you stick your Sniply CTA, your prospects get good, relevant and interesting content.
This leads me to the second tip:
Choose carefully the pages to which you link, and adjust them to your target audience. If your website is about technology, you wouldn’t link it to a fashion blog, right? It just doesn’t fit your audience, and will not pay off!
To increase the relevancy of your content and enhance the sidekick effect, combine Sniply with other tools:
- Create a content alert for your website’s keywords using Mention, Google Alerts or BuzzSumo. You probably already have such an alert.
- Choose the most relevant results and stick a Sniply CTA to each of them.
- Share these articles massively and regularly on your social media using an automation tool (Hootsuite, Buffer, etc).
Since these articles are highly relevant to your audience, they have good chances of being read and shared by your potential leads. Articles will be shared and re-tweeted, all with your little Sniply “footprint”. Soon, every person interested in articles in your field will encounter one of your Sniply calls to action.
Let’s see an example of how we make it work:
At Boost the News, we help businesses promote branded content created by bloggers. We have several content alerts, on keywords such as “influencer marketing” and “promote blog”. Using Buzzsumo, we received an alert on a trending article about blog promotion.
We know that it’s exactly our topic, and people who read it will be interested in Boost the News. So we take the article and create a Sniply CTA.
Now share innocently:
Again, don’t forget to mention the source for more visibility.
When you repeat this practice with tens of relevant articles, your presence becomes undeniable, and you become the master of the domain, without creating any independent content.
3. Troll yourself a little
Ok, you’re done having fun other pages. But can you troll your own page?
Recycling your own content is a common practice among bloggers and content marketers. Time and again they will promote old articles on newsletters and social media. So why not spice this practice up with Sniply?
There are several advantages of reviving older posts with Sniply:
- Evergreen articles remain relevant for a long time. You can connect them to current promotions and landing pages without any problem. Since you stick the Sniply CTA on the page, you don’t have to make actual changes in the original text.
- You can be creative and use some self-humor to shake the dust from old articles.
- When linking to your own page, you are sure that the page’s content is relevant to your call to action.
In this example, we took an article on our blog, and linked it to a landing page that was created later:
Reusing your own content has never been easier!
Summing up
There is something inherently boring in the whole copy-paste that has become the content marketing industry. Sniply changes it. It makes your work more fun and creative, increasing ROI with highly clickable content.
Reusing your own content or combining it with other tools, you can boost your visibility on social media among a carefully selected audience.
About the Author (Guest Blogger)
Daniel Slomka, Content Specialist at Boost the News
Daniel Slomka is a content and social media specialist for Boost the News. He works with bloggers, publishers and brands to promote high-quality content online.
