Brief:
A client requested an article (500-800 words) on "customer acquisition through content" that was HTML-optimized and included relevant keywords (SEO) as provided by the client.

Copy:
<H1>Customer Acquisition – Trust Through Content</H2>
At its core, business is a relationship game. Once you've identified your customer base, how do you go about attracting them? Simple – show them what they want to see.

<H2>Long-distance relationships</H2>
Customers are more comfortable doing business with companies who they know. This should be as true for your online presence as for any other aspect of marketing, if your business is to stay competitive. Notably, a recent US census saw online shopping overtake brick & mortar stores in several sectors for the first time in history.
This only serves to underline how necessary creating an effective online presence is, begging the question: How do we develop and nurture online relationships with our customers?

<H2>Challenges you'll face</H2>
The acquisition of customers is hard, there are no two ways about it. Beyond wrestling with the costs, beyond identifying quality potential customers, and beyond drowning in hundreds of creatives from your marketing team, let's look at what is arguably the hardest aspect of customer acquisition – building trust.

<H3>Who are you to tell me what to buy?</H3>
We're hard-wired to be biased toward what we know and trust. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that customers just don't trust businesses anymore. They've lost faith in company reports and press releases, and prefer the recommendations of their friends or family instead. Therefore, you've got to be willing to invest in winning customers over.

<H3>There are a number of monetary concerns</H3>
Of course it's important to pay attention to the cost of customer acquisition. We all want a positive return on our investment, and we all want quantifiable proof that what we get is appropriate to what we give. However, it can be dangerous getting bogged down in ROIs, CACs, and LTVs, to the point where you lose sight of the main focus – the customer.
According to Blake Morgan at Forbes, “operational efficiency is the exact opposite of a quality customer experience”. Building up a huge customer base could leave your business ill-equipped to deliver personalized customer support. Therefore, it's important to be smart about your customer acquisition.

<H2>Strategies & Approaches to Customer Acquisition</H2>
These days, words like “cold calling”, “spam”, and “pop-up ads” illicit more bad emotions than the recent conclusion of Game of Thrones. Luckily, inbound marketing can be a great alternative to these more traditional forms of outreach. It's a great way to effectively demonstrate what your brand is all about!

<H3>Show them what you've got</H3>
What are some methods we can apply to work towards a solution? Effective content marketing would be a good start. Honestly, what better way could there be to show your potential customer who you are?
This isn't easy, however, and requires you to produce content which is consistently engaging to your potential customers. In addition, you will need to apply proper SEO in order to be correctly indexed and displayed in search engines.

“Content marketing is an ideal companion to B2B sales”, says Jeremy Durant, a marketing and branding strategist. This is due in large part to the inherent nature of the B2B sales process, which requires both multiple touch points with your clients to stay effective, and a variety of relevant and up-to-date content.

<H3>Teach, Don't Tell</H3>
One important aspect of content marketing is education. Through research and keyword searches, find out what your customer wants to know. The idea being that your company, through education content marketing, should provide answers.
Establishing yourself as a reliable source of information is a great way to position yourself in the eyes of the customer. Your priority with these campaigns should be to educate, not sell.

<H2>We want what you want</H2>
The trick is to intrigue your customer. It's not enough to say that customers won't trust who they don't know. We can confidently state that customers won't trust who they don't like. While in the distant past of the 1990's, this idea was represented by “cool” companies and graffiti-style logos, nowadays it's a little less straightforward.

Think of your approach to content marketing like that of a successful YouTuber. The content that they produce is consistent, relevant, and of good quality. Of course, we can all only hope to one day be as successful as an eight-year-old multi-millionaire reviewing toys for a living.

Brief: A news organization requested catchy descriptions (max. 2,000 characters including spaces) for documentary-style videos (15-20 mins.). I've included several examples.

Copy:

MH17: A year without the truth

A year after the disaster [redacted] looks at the alternative evidence on who shot down Flight MH-17.
In the months after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine, there was little hard evidence from the official inquiry. Several theories on who shot down the airliner killing all 298 people on board were put forward. [redacted] spent weeks visiting the crash site, talking to witnesses, and meeting relatives of the dead to explore some of the evidence concerning the downing of the civilian Boeing 777.

In the disputed Donbass area of Ukraine, reporters talked to eyewitnesses who claim they saw a Ukrainian fighter jet shoot down the airliner. While on the ground, a year after the crash, pieces of wreckage can still be found. The local authorities are collecting all these new pieces and forward to the investigators in the Netherlands when possible.

For the families of the passengers and crew, the uncertainty of what happened that day in July 2014 is taking its toll. The wife of the pilot in charge of the flight has suffered a mental breakdown due to the grief, and her relatives are questioning the investigation, demanding answers.
A world away in Europe, passenger’s families are joining together for a class-action lawsuit against Ukraine. The families’ lawyers say that fighting in the area in the days leading up to the crash saw air battles and the downing of military aircraft. If that’s the case, the lawyers argue Ukraine should have closed the region’s airspace to civilian traffic, and Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 should have been nowhere near the danger zone.
At the time, the official investigation carried out by the Dutch authorities was still underway, and it had not issued its first interim report. When asked to comment about the various theories surrounding the downing of flight MH-17, the crash investigators could offer no information or clarification.

~~~

Renaissance

70 years since the threat of Fascism was stopped, it seems that there is a resurgence of fascist-like ideals in Europe. This “nationalist renaissance” is especially prevalent in Latvia. During the events of the war, Latvia saw the coming of soldiers from both Germany and the Soviet Union. However, opinions there vary on who were the true “liberators”.

One of the most chilling reminders of the Nazi occupation is the remnants of the Salaspils concentration camp. Official Latvian history claims that it was a work education camp, but the words of the Salaspils survivors tell a different story – One of nightmare and death. Forensic evidence does prove that thousands of people died within the walls of Salaspils. We hear from several such survivors, who were but children at the time, as they tell about their time there.

Nazi occupation of Latvia also resulted in the formation of Latvian soldiers into the Waffen SS, Nazi-aligned military units. We meet one of the last, if not the very last, of these soldiers remaining in Latvia. He unabashedly tells a very different story than that of the Salaspils survivors. In our story, he represents those Latvians who looked favorably upon the Germans, believing that they would free Latvia from the “barbaric” Soviet occupation.

Many critics find flawed logic in this new generation of fascists and neo-Nazi groups in Europe, seeing as they were born in the modern age, and didn’t experience the war themselves. A great deal of people also believe that the Latvian government is turning a blind eye to what occurred there during WW II. At any rate, this story certainly proves that history is not fact, and is perceived differently by different people.

~~~

Back to Sleepy Hollow, Kazakhstan

Founded in the 1970’s, the small village of Kalachi in northern Kazakhstan has always been a calm and safe place for its more than 6,500 residents. All of this changed around three years ago, when its citizens began being affecting by a strange sleeping sickness epidemic. But it’s very isolated, and you won’t it on any list of epidemic diseases. Since first visiting 6 months ago, [redacted] returns to Kalachi, now that news is spreading of a possible cause to this mysterious illness.

Affecting hundreds of people, some more than once, it’s important to know “what is sleeping sickness”? This is due to encephalopathy brought on by a lack of oxygen to the brain. The symptoms of sleeping sickness vary, but most people who are affected immediately pass out, and this affliction causes the person to lose all energy, and have an overwhelming urge to sleep. Children can even suffer hallucinations.

With no cure to this sleeping sickness epidemic as of yet, many people have already fled Kalachi, as the only sure thing seems to be that it is localized to that area. With a dwindling population of only 95 families, the village has turned into a ghost town. However, some people are determined to stay in their homeland.

In the end, heightened levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air were identified as the immediate cause. Possible reasons as to how this came about range from radiation to groundwater contamination, either possibly being caused by the chemical and mineral debris which fills a nearby abandoned mine shaft, used for collecting uranium.

This frightening affliction is reminiscent of the infamous African sleeping sickness epidemic. With no solution to the problem, the local government is currently undertaking further investigations and relocation programs, planning a complete evacuation procedure of the village by 2016.

~~~

Life without Litter

In our environmentally-conscious world, eco-living and recycling are becoming more and more prevalent, and it seems like everyone is going green. But is it possible to live completely without litter? In his two week experiment, [redacted] correspondent [redacted] aims to find that out.

The first day, he carries a trash bag around with him, in order to find out just how much waste he produces on a daily basis. It quickly becomes clear that almost all of the products use plastic in some form or another, which can’t be reused. Some changes were needed.

With the help of an NYC-based waste-free blogger and a Moscow eco-activist, [redacted] learns some eco-friendly living tips for cutting down on waste. Using reusable shopping bags, creating homemade shampoo and homemade toothpaste, taking his own containers to the market to buy meat and dairy products, and going to great lengths to sort and transport his recycling are just some of the efforts he makes in order to reduce his level of solid waste.

There are several things which [redacted] finds that would make living green in Moscow much easier. Among them are more recycling centers, Environmentally-friendly packaging, and less plastic use.
In the end, he finds that, while certainly not easy, with a few lifestyle changes, it is certainly possible to reduce your ecological impact. So anyone can go green - as long as you’re willing to make the effort!