Want to know the secret of how many businesses, shops, retailers, and brands are still growing their customer bases, sales and bottom lines without breaking their budget? It’s because they’re hiring companies like Magnus Marketing to implement a marketing strategy called Content Marketing.
Our friends at Hubspot have studied and confirmed that because of the growth of new technology, changes in consumer wants and needs shifting almost all leverage from seller to buyer, and how communication between brand and consumer has absolutely flipped 180 degrees, the role of Content Marketing is growing and even evolving rapidly – without the majority of brands, small businesses and companies even realizing:
A new phenomenon mixing Content Marketing and what’s called Context Marketing: Content marketing (producing helpful content to attract visitors) in fact combines with context marketing (making your marketing more personalized and relevant to an individual using data) combine to form inbound marketing (Lockwood & Wong, 2013).
It’s all about the right Target Audience: Great content is the cornerstone of all great inbound marketing. But you can write the world’s best ebook or blog post and never see any ROI if it’s not surfaced to the right audience, at the exact right time in their buyer journey, and with the appropriate promotional messaging. In short, you need to market your content, and context allows you to gain insight to pinpoint why each group you’re reaching would want that specific piece (Lockwood & Wong, 2013).
Content marketing began as both a B2B and B2C strategy with “marketers now need to produce a constant flow of new content, from blog posts and social media updates to videos, ebooks, or webinars” (Goliger & Hussain, 2013).
At Magnus we’ve expanded the idea of content marketing over the last 6-7 years for our own clients and brands into an ultimate marketing strategy that doesn’t rely on budget, traditional advertising or expensive promotions. A good content marketing strategy certainly takes that content and pushes it through digital places like your website, the blog section of your website for articles and commentary, social media places, or e-books/digital marketing pieces like fliers or cards, but we’ve expanded that idea back into traditional methods such as print materials, direct mail, signage, branding, and other non-digital forms.
Joe Pulizzi in his book, “Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less” says there are six principles:
* Your content must fill an unmet need or answer a question for your customer
* You must deliver your content consistently
* Your content needs to be written in your voice, preferably with some humor
* You need to express an opinion rather than giving a balanced history report
* You must avoid sales speak, as it destroys the value of your content
* You must aim to produce the very best content relating to your content niche
No matter what B2B or B2C business you are, there is content everywhere. Let’s say you’re a fresh fish market. Here is a list of ideas and elements for content:
- The early morning catch of fresh fish coming in off the dock
- Cleaning the steamers and pans used for prepared foods
- A customer picking up a special order prepared for a party or event
- Featuring special premium items and merchandise in the store
- Using the same creative/artwork for your latest promotion
- Showing off a new fish featured for a limited time
- Customer quotes or comments as testimonials of your most loyal customers and fans
- Awards and recognitions
- Healthy benefits of eating certain fish
- Contests of customers submitting media of their bbqs or parties cooking or serving your product
- Featuring processes or systems you use unlike your competitors to maintain a high quality product
- Showing off your friendly employees and staff
We could keep building, organizing and finalizing into a content funnel this list. But you get the idea. Then let’s match how each piece of content could be pushed through a digital medium of yours:
- The early morning catch of fresh fish coming in off the dock: Instagram photo (then linked to your Facebook)
- Cleaning the steamers and pans used for prepared foods: Video post on Facebook and your blog
- A customer picking up a special order prepared for a party or event: Instagram photo relinked to Facebook too
- Featuring special premium items and merchandise in the store: Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts; E-mail marketing; featured section on your website and a blog post
- Using the same creative/artwork for your latest promotion: Website feature on your homepage; blog post; repurposed onto your social media places (platforms) especially Twitter with a hashtag
- Showing off a new fish featured for a limited time: Instagram post relinked onto Facebook
- Customer quotes or comments as testimonials of your most loyal customers and fans: twitter – then also promote on facebook to go on twitter to see this
- Awards and recognitions: e-mail marketing; blog; and social media
- Healthy benefits of eating certain fish: write a short blog or facebook post titled “Top 5 reasons why ___ fish can make you live longer”
- Contests of customers submitting media of their bbqs or parties cooking or serving your product: instagram, to twitter, to facebook all with a hashtag of your business and link to your online ordering (you don’t have that? please call us).
- Featuring processes or systems you use unlike your competitors to maintain a high quality product: website & blog
- Showing off your friendly employees and staff: facebook
Are you liking our process for your Content Marketing strategy? Reach out to us now as we’re taking on a few more clients by the end of the year for this specialized marketing program. Not only do we complete a full marketing analysis including customer profiles and competitor analysis, but we also include metrics and data to track the impact and increases against your sales and goals, and seamlessly integrate all of this marketing content into your overall marketing goals.
We do like advertising and believe it can work. But – Stop being forced and bullied into advertising programs that don’t make sense for you, kill your budgets and don’t provide analytical support you can benchmark and compare to your overall efforts.
