Category: Marketing

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Content Marketing: Key Approaches

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.

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UGC Contributor Type & Involvement

UGC by Level of Contributor Participation 

Forester, a marketing research firm, conducted a survey of US consumers and asked them how often they participated in at least one of the indicated activities per month. And what they found, while not necessarily surprising, is interesting nonetheless.

13% of contributors are creators – These are people actively producing and uploading content such a blogs, videos, or photos.

19% are critics – These are users providing ratings, reviews, or evaluations that power the bulk of eWord of Mouth

15% are collectors – They are doing social bookmarking, posting things to Pinterest are similar sites

19% are joiners – People who join social media websites w/o contributing content

33% are passive spectators – They read posts, watch videos, and look at photos

and 52% are inactives – Those not engaging in any of the other activities

Now, for you math whizzes out there that have already added up all of the percentages and figured out that it’s over 100%, some consumers may be in more than one category.

The participation by consumers in UGC is obviously related to the level of involvement that each type of UGC requires. The more difficult it is contribute, the less of that contribution we’re likely to see. If it were so simple and easy to create online content, then people like this kid wouldn’t be making so much money. BTW this kid and his family were the top Youtube earners in 2018. They made $22 million dollars. On Youtube. In a year. 

UGC by Level of Content Involvement

So back to the issue of involvement with content. We can breakdown UGC based on how much effort, or involvement, it requires to execute the UGC. Again, the more difficult it is contribute, the less of that contribution we’re likely to see.

High involvement content is difficult and time-consuming to create. Writing up blogs, doing podcast shows, or recording videos requires planning, production and editing time, and promotion to be successful. in fact, this category of UGC is less about commenting on brands and more about contributors creating their own products.

  • High involvement
    • Blogs
    • Podcasts
    • Videos

Medium Involvement UGC has a much lower bar. These are activities that require a little effort, but have much less impact. Writing product reviews on Amazon or other sites, gathering links for your favorite things on Pinterest, or tweeting up a storm on Twitter.

  • Medium involvement
    • Product Reviews (e.g., Amazon)
    • Social Bookmarking (Pinterest, StumbleUpon)
    • Microblogging (e.g., Twitter)

Low involvement require very little effort and they also tend to have little impact.

  • Low involvement
    • Post Comments/Replies
    • Forwards (e.g., Retweets, Repins)
    • Ratings

Why are UGC and eWOM effective? 

Next, let’s look at why UGC and eWOM are so effective. 

Consumers trust each other more than marketers

91% of consumers trust online reviews from strangers as much as from actual friends and family. This is a big deal as it shows that online eWOM has nearly the same power as face-to-face WOM

According to Nielsen, 75% of people don’t believe advertisements, but 90% of consumers believe suggestions from friends and family. The brand doesn’t inspire nearly the same amount of trust as those we know.

eWOM generates two times more sales than paid ads and

People are 4x more likely to buy when referred by friends. Again, strong indicators that who we trust matters a lot when it comes to what we buy.

Consumers crave authenticity

Consumers can easily sniff out a slick marketing message. That’s not what they want. A recent survey by Cohn & Wolfe found that 63% of consumers would buy from a company they consider to be authentic over a competitor.

So, how do consumers choose brands then? They choose the ones that most understand them and can speak to them authentically. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that many marketers can find difficult to learn.

Consumers want to be a part of a community

According to psychological research (McMillian & Chavis 1986), there are four things that drive a sense of community:

  • Membership
  • Influence
  • Integration and fulfillment of needs
  • Shared emotional connection

I’ll give you an example from a recent experience of mine. This past summer I took my family on a great vacation to Central Europe. I wanted to have a good camera to take with us, not just use my smartphone camera. I did my research and picked a nice Fujifilm model (the X100F if you’re wondering). What I didn’t know at the time, was that were is a growing community on Facebook where owners of this specific camera can talk about the camera, Fuji, photography in general, and share photos. I was a fellow owner of this particular camera and so I belonged. I had membership in the community.

Membership also included the influence that individual users could have over the community, but also the influence that the community can have on its members. A 2-way street. There are some expert photographers in the Facebook Group that have a lot of influence over how other members act and think. But the community can also wield its own influence over individual members, and also over Fuji, as when we make product suggestions.

Integration and fulfillment of needs is really about reinforcement. Does the group foster a sense of togetherness that is rewarding to its members.

Finally, shared emotional connection. The interactions of members in shared events and the specific attributes of the events may facilitate or inhibit the strength of the community. As I get to know the other members of the group, post photos, critique others’ photos, and share histories, the connection between the community and myself grows stronger.

Who should use UGC and eWOM?

All marketers basically. There’s no real reason not to. While most businesses have at least some form of UGC—like low involvement social media posts allowing user comments—right now only 33% of businesses are actively seeking & collecting reviews of their products or services online. This is a tremendous opportunity being squandered…as long as they have confidence in their products or services, of course. When we consider that 86% of millennials say UGC is a good indicator of the quality of a brand or service, this is a strong endorsement for integrating UGC into a brand’s marketing efforts.

UGC is also generally very inexpensive to implement. Join a social network and manage it, add a review and rating system to your website, give customers the ability to share with others. It’s easy to get started and it’s a mystery why all companies don’t at least do these things.

What are the Privacy Implications of UGC and eWOM?

One of the themes that you’re going to see throughout this course—especially in keeping with the Marquette Core Curriculum Discovery Tier track—is the idea that all of these digital marketing related concepts that we talk about certainly have benefits, but they may also come at a cost.

Some recent research has shown that consumers are willing to pay privacy costs for the gains in social capital made possible by creating personally identifiable UGC online. Costs such as receiving unsolicited marketing communications (spam email) and unwanted advances from online acquaintances  

The other aspect of this is the potential effects UGC can have on individuals professionally. Everyone has heard the stories of someone posting something online, only to have it used against them at work or during a hiring process. And yet we still post things online that can potentially have serious consequences. Despite the fact we spend so much time on social media liking and commenting, It’s been argued there is an emotional detachment between users and their digital data. People just don’t see the data they leave behind as a reflection of themselves. And that’s unfortunate because it can have serious repercussions personally and professionally. We’ll talk more about that later in the semester when we cover Online Reputation Management.

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User-Generated Content

At the end of 2006, Time magazine did what that normally does. They named a Person of the Year. In keeping with the past, the Person of the Year is the person or people who made the “strongest influence” on history in the past year. Sometimes the Person of the Year is a force for good, sometimes not so much (Hitler). In 2006 though, Time did something unexpected. They named you the Person of the Year. Ya, that’s right you. And well, me too. Actually, all of us. All those who contribute to the internet were seen as the strongest influence on history for the year 2006.

But how have you and I had such a strong influence on history? Not just in 2006, but really every year since? It’s called User-Generated Content or UGC. And it’s kind of a big deal

What is UGC?

So what is User-generated content? UGC is any type of content provided by unpaid contributors. There are few important things to address about this definition. Let’s start with the use of the term “user”. This is a hold-over from the software development industry. As marketers we typically don’t like using the word “user” to refer to consumers or customers, as it dehumanizes people a bit. But because UGC platforms like social media and product review sites originated from the software industry, the “user” moniker stuck.

Actually, let’s talk a bit more about how we refer to these people contributing content to us online. One of the concepts in Media Theory that gets a bit of attention is how we refer to people. Media and cultural studies often refer to them as “audiences” or receivers of content. In marketing, we describe these same people as consumers of content. Unfortunately, neither of these perspectives is adequate in this modern age where people can now contribute to the online communities that exist around their favorite products online. Hence, the word “contributors” in the definition.

I should add though, that the idea that we audience/consumers were just passive couch potatoes in the past but now we want to finally be active participants—this is bogus. The reality is, we’ve always been interested in being a part of the creation process. Whether it’s sitting in a live TV studio audience, being a contestant on a game show, or a “star” of reality TV. The difference is now we have the internet and online platforms, which allow all of us to contribute content with widely available and affordable tools (laptops, smartphones). There’s nothing strictly “online” or “digital” about UGC. It’s just now these online or digital tools make it so much easier for users, er audiences, I mean, consumers to contribute.

Finally, these contributors are unpaid. That may be a little confusing sloggers like Casey Neistadt actually make quite a bit of money, he’s making money from advertising on his content deliver platform (Youtube) or video sponsorsBut that doesn’t necessarily mean they are not getting value from it. Don’t forget that there is a certain amount of social currency attached to those upvotes on Reddit, retweets on Twitter, and likes on Facebook. 

Feedback vs eWOM

There are two ways to think about UGC:

  • What are consumers saying to me?
  • What are consumers saying about me?

The first is customer feedback. This is nothing new. It used to be customer comment box with the notecards and little pencils. Now our techniques are a bit more sophisticated, but the underlying concept is the same: Ask your customers for their honest feedback and use that input to improve your products and services.

The second is word-of-mouth, or in this case, electronic word-of-mouth, since it is facilitated by electronic means. But this really isn’t new either. If I tell any one of you—face to face—about a new restaurant and how great it is, this word-of-mouth can be very persuasive and useful to a brand (in this case the restaurant). As with customer feedback, the concept is the same, but the tools have changed. We now have social media, review sites like Yelp, and other platforms we must pay attention to as marketers to ensure we’re aware of what’s being said about us online. When consumers engage with each other and bring brands into their dialog, we call this word-of-mouth. When it’s done online, we call in e-word-of-mouth.

BTW, eWOM is UGC, but not all UGC is eWOM. For example, if a customer sends a direct message to a brand or posts a question to a brand on social media, that’s UGC, but it’s not eWOM.

Not all UGC or eWOM is created the same, however. In fact, there are different levels of involvement that a user can engage in when creating UGC.

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Paid, Owned, & Earned Media in Digital Marketing

A concept that you may remember from Introduction to Marketing is the idea of Paid, Owned, & Earned media. This is just a convenient way of organizing our media into understandable chunks. And we can just as easily organize our digital media the same way. 

When it comes to creating value for our customers, it’s important to know all of the different places you can expend your marketing efforts to get the biggest pay off. Since you’re probably already familiar with the concept of Paid, Owned & Earned Media, this comic might resonate with you.

Now, I know explaining a joke never makes it funnier, but I want to walk you through each of the panels is this comic because, while funny, it actually hits pretty close to home for a lot of digital marketers.

First, Paid media. As you know, this encompasses all of the media we use to reach consumers through paid means. In a nutshell, advertising. 

In the comic, this is illustrated as a billboard. But this could just as easily be a magazine or newspaper print ad, TV commercial, radio spot, or heck, even a banner towed by an airplane. In the digital realm, paid media might be a Google ad on a search engine results page on your laptop, a Facebook ad on a tablet computer, Youtube preroll video on your mobile phone, or any number of other digital-based advertising opportunities. As the comic shows, it’s essentially buying the attention of the consumer. We’ll talk a lot more about Paid media when we get to the “Communicating Value with Digital Tools” section of the course.

Next up is Owned media. These are, of course, all of the forms of media that we “own” or have direct control over. 

With traditional owned media it might be sending a direct mail to a marketing list we own, sending out press releases, a print newsletter, or even using a utilizing a retail location in new ways. In the digital realm, owned media might be your website, social media accounts, Youtube channel. Again, anything that we have direct control over to get our message out. 

So, for example, here’s an email from Adorama informing me about a special promotion they have going on. I’ve purchased things from Adorama in the past and chances are they’re analytics is sophisticated enough to know that I have recently been looking at digital cameras. This is a highly targeted direct mail over an owned media channel. 

Email is an owned media channel because Adorama owns the email marketing database list that they use within their email marketing system. Utilizing owned media is about getting the most from the resources you directly own and control. What can you add to the website that could provide additional value to your customers or prospects? What databases can you leverage for email marketing or customer insight to improve your offerings. Owned media is one of, if not the most, important aspect of digital marketing.

Earned media is the most elusive of the three, because you have no control over it.  

Traditional earned media might be exposure on the nightly news, a word-of-mouth mention between two friends, even a famed star from the Michelin guide. Examples of digital earned media might include celebrity mentions, uh pseudo-celebrity mentions, ratings and reviews on the thousands of ecommerce and reviews sites, and electronic word-of-mouth on social media networks. Oh wait, let me update that for you. When you think of earned media, think of the stories bloggers, newspapers and magazines run, all of the comments your customers make about you online, the reviews and ratings left online. There’s a reason why firms craft press releases and send them out every time their CEO sneezes. You set the budget for your paid advertising, and you own that fancy website, but you’re completely at the mercy of others when it comes to earned media. Well, ok. Maybe not completely at their mercy. There are a lot of things you can do to,well, earn that earned media.

Now, the last frame of the comic, the punchline, funny as it is, is actually the truth for a lot of firms. The reality is that no matter how much time and effort you invest time or money in paid, owned, and earned media, the consumer doesn’t owe you anything. To resonate with consumers your message has to have authenticity. To keep customers your product or service has to provide real value. That’s what this course is about, finding ways to create, deliver, communicate, and capture value. For authenticity we can turn to user-generated content and electronic word-of-mouth. And that’s what we’re covering next session. 

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Apple Unveils Its Core Service Principles

Apple rolled out four new service offerings in an unprecedented event at the Steve Jobs Theatre on its new campus in Cupertino March 25th. Two were entirely new offerings (Apple Arcade and Apple Card), while the other two built on existing efforts (Apple TV+ and Apple News+).

What was most interesting about the event to me is the core service principles Apple unveiled as part of the event. I cannot recall a firm explicitly stating how it intends to design and market all of its future service products. In fact, Apple was very explicit about this. For three of the four new service offerings it debuted, the slide above was shown to the audience. 

Easy to use and Attention to detail should come as no surprise. These principles have been in Apple’s DNA from the very beginning. Private and secure, though nonchalantly placed in the middle of the list, is a philosophical differentiator that Apple has been repeating over and over again. Expert curation is a more recent trend in Apple service products. It’s News app bucks the machine learning trend and features articles actually chosen by real-live human beings. Personalized, of course, recalls the intimacy we enjoy with the customized experiences of products like iPhone. Finally, Family Sharing, builds on Apple’s earlier innovation of allowing family members to share access to apps, music, movies, and books.

So why did Apple only share the slide during three of the product announcements and not all four? The slide may not necessarily have been conspicuously absent, but there were good reasons why the presenters couldn’t show it. The slide was not shown during the Apple Card announcement because at least two of Apple’s principles are missing from the product (for now): Expert curation and Family sharing. This begs the question: could Apple add them?

Family sharing seems an easy one for Apple to address. As of now, the Apple Card is intended for single users. You get the card and only you can use it. It may not necessarily need to be this way though. Based on all of the innovative features Apple is bringing to the credit card experience, having functionality where you could share your card with other family members would be an interesting addition. Imagine your daughter is attending a concert with friends and you wanted to give her some spending money for the show. You could share your card and put a spending cap on her purchases for the evening and she could also request more funds a la Screen Time. At the very least, sharing a card between spouses should be a no-brainer.

Expert curation is more difficult to envision. But if Apple branched out from its current plans to offer immediate Apple Cash percentage rebates for purchases and instead offered rewards that were custom tailored, er curated, for the card holder, that could be an interesting development in the credit card industry.

Apple’s four new service offerings seem interesting, but I’m most impressed with how Apple has articulated its vision for its service products.