What is Content Marketing?
So hopefully, you’ve watched the video on Marcus Sheridan. If you haven’t please stop this video and go watch the “How a Pool company Used Content Marketing to Save Its Business” video. Marcus Sheridan is a great example of how you can take a thought leadership role in an industry and end up becoming a sales leader as well.
Alright, so what is Content Marketing? As content marketing marketing expert Jeff Bullas said, “Content marketing is the effective use of content that informs, educates, entertains, and inspires customers to discover you, trust you and buy from you.”
There are two things I really want to cover in this video.One, introduce you to five key approaches marketers can take to content marketing, and two, show you some great content marketing examples. And remember, whether we use one of these elements or all five at once, we’re trying to inform, educate, entertain and inspire.
Let’s look at those key approaches to do content marketing:
Leveraging Storytelling
I’ve got a couple slides to share with you. Please read each one carefully. You can pause the video to read each one.
Here’s the first:
“Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children. In Zambia, severe rainfall deficits have resulted in a 42% drop in maize production from 2000. As a result, an estimated three million Zambians face hunger. Four million Angolans — one-third of the population — have been forced to flee their homes. More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.”
And here’s the second:
“Any money that you donate will go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl who lives in Mali in Africa. Rokia is desperately poor and faces a threat of severe hunger, even starvation. Her life will be changed for the better as a result of your financial gift. With your support, and the support of other caring sponsors, Save the Children will work with Rokia’s family and other members of the community to help feed and educate her, and provide her with basic medical care.”
Which of these passages would be more apt to get you to donate? Is it the more statistical appeal? Learning about the fate of faceless millions in an African country. Or is it the more personal appeal? The story of one suffering person who you could potentially help.
If you said the second one, then you’re like most people. If you said the first one, then you’re a soulless robot. Ok, just kidding. But here’s the reality. The passage about Rokia is extremely effective. Why? Because it’s a story. Our brains, it turns out, are fundamentally designed to create and interpret stories. Stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone. Stories make us feel empathy. There’s a reason why Presidents traditionally invite guests to the State of the Union and share their stories. It’s a hugely effective method of tapping into emotions and imprinting information on someone’s (in this case all of America’s) memory.
We can use this to our advantage with content marketing. Every business has stories to tell. It’s the marketers job to figure out which of those stories will most resonate with customers and how to deliver it.
Watch the video I link to in this session called “The Man Who Walked Around the World.” It’s the fascinating story of the brand Johnnie Walker. In the video you follow actor Robert Carlyle as he strolls down a Scottish country round recounting the history of the brand. It’s six minutes long and was filmed in one continuous take. A great bit of storytelling!
Integrate Personalization
Next Integrate Personalization. Personalization can be a useful tool for motivating customers to interact with your brand. Whether it’s engaging with an email, consuming online content, or even adding a product to an online shopping cart and purchasing, personalization is a powerful mechanism for marketers to use. In fact, 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences and marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences.
What are some different ways we can integrate personalization into our marketing from the least personalized to most:
Segmentation
The first step to personalization is segmentation. For those of you who have already taken Intro to Marketing, you should know this well. Segmentation is not personalization though. In effect, with segmentation you are grouping like individuals together and creating marketing content that would appeal to the whole segment. Personalization is addressing each and every individual, well individually, and creating a unique experience or unique content for them. The important thing to realize is Segmentation is a manually process, while personalization is an automated process. For segmentation, you can use the standard demographic variables like geographic location, gender, whether they’re a parent or not, even personal interests. You can also use mobile device information, purchase history, and website session behavior to specifically target groups of customers that might be combinations of all four. You can also create profiles of specific customer types to help you. We call these personas and that’s the next video for the content marketing session.
Now let’s look at two types of personalization
Journey-based Personalization
The customer journey is the process that a customer follows along the path to purchase. Customer journey maps like these are a common tool that marketers use to understand how customers move along the purchase process. You can use this map to determine the right content to expose your customers to at the right time. Notice how digital marketing (the items in bold) mix with traditional marketing at each stage of the customer journey.
One-to-One Personalization
Finally, the holy grail for many marketers is to provide a marketing message that is custom created for the individual. And that’s one-to-one personalization. That can involved knowing exactly what the customer has purchased in the past and providing offers that are specifically tailored based on this information. Now this is not something that can be done manually at scale. Think of an email campaign that sends customers an email with product suggestions based on previous purchases including a coupon based on how much they’ve spent in the past. Every email that goes out would be different. If you had to do this manually, it would take way too long to be cost effective. You’ll have to use specialized tools to provide personalized content algorithmically, or through artificial intelligence.
Be Honest and Open
[screencast of learning hub showing downsides info] One of the big reasons for Marcus Sheridan’s and River Pools success is that they were very honest and open with the information they were willing to provide pool shoppers. Even going so far as to provide the downsides of fiberglass pools, even though that’s the only type of pool they sell. When you’re open and honest you build credibility. When you have credibility, people will trust you. Also, when you put an actual person’s face to the company it’s easier to communicate honesty and openness. There’s a sense of authenticity that is difficult to replicate.
Quality over Quantity
While it is important to provide a lot of information to consumers when they are in product research mode, that doesn’t necessarily mean they need to drown in information. Knowing who your customer is and providing the right content at the right time and the right place is probably a better strategy. In fact, thinking about the buyer’s journey mentioned earlier, illustrated here as a buyer’s funnel, what information is the right information for a customer to have at the right time in their buying journey? This means that you may have content quantity, but you expose the content at the right times for the customer, in effect raising its value to the customer .
I should mention to, that anything worth doing is worth doing well. If you’re going to write a blog post, have it edited. If you’re going to produce a video, make sure the results look professional. Your intention could be good, but if the end result is content that looks amateurish, well then that’s exactly what the customer is going to think about you and you’re offering.
Employ Visual Content
Just as our brains are geared to create and interpret stories, they’re also fantastic machines for processing visual information. 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual in nature and our brains can process that information is as little as 13 milliseconds. Because you seldom have a lot of time to make an impression on a potential customer, using visual information is by far the most efficient mode of communication. It’s therefore not surprising that the vast majority of content marketing you’re likely to encounter is visual in nature.
Some examples of visual content include infographics, photos as in an Instagram feed, the use of memes within traditional and digital media, and, of course, videos.
Ultimately, “Content marketing is about providing content so useful and relevant that the consumer starts to think of you as the expert, which builds trust and loyalty and will make your business the first they think of when they’re ready to buy.” That last part is an important point, because depending on the product, consumers can do a lot of research on a product before they decide to pull the trigger. Wouldn’t it be really helpful to be the business that someone thinks of when they’re ready open their wallet?
One last thing, there is one problem with Content Marketing that I should mention though.
At a certain point, the cost of creating content for your existing and potential customers will be higher than the value that content is designed to help capture. In other words, if you’re spending $5,000 per month to create customized content, but your analysis tells you it’s only help bring in an additional $4,000 in purchases or lead value. It’s not money well spent at that point. Stay cognizant of the costs vs benefits.
Or you could have the opposite problem (huge budgets and you struggle to create more content). But it’s wise to know when you have diminishing returns.