CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is an approach centered around creating and sharing content that is valuable and relevant to your target group in order to attract customers. This content should not be about selling your product or service, instead it should be about offering useful content, that can help your customers. It is a very powerful and effective approach, because by being helpful you form a bond with the customers without them feeling like you are pushing a product or service onto them, or trying to convince them of something. It makes the customers like you, something that is extremely valuable.
Content marketing can be explained as a way of making your brand take the on the role as a helpful friend to current and future customers. Whilst traditional marketing uses a push technique, content marketing is all about the pull technique. When you freely offer customers something valuable that they might even would have been willing to pay for, you build trust and a good reputation.
"GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECIEVE"
Several companies send out information to its customers, either through emails, ads, etc. Instead of making this content annoying spam, offer them valuable information. This can make your customers actually look forward to receiving your marketing, as well as make them spend more time with it, perhaps even share it with friends.
Traditionally you would have to rent space and attention for your marketing on social media, websites, tv etc. With content marketing you become the publisher. You build your own audience, and attract your own attention, which is a much more sustainable approach.
PULL VS PUSH
CONTENT MARKETING
BENEFITS
You build organic awareness for your brand.
When the valuable content you created ranks high on search engines, or is widely being shared, you get «free» brand awareness. The fact that it is widely shared tells your audience that it is relevant and useful, which leads to them being more likely to check it out. Content marketing therefore helps your brand get a positive word-of-mouth.
You create preference for your brand.
Engaging content marketing creates preference through thought leadership – it makes you a trusted source of information and education. You can also create preference through relationships, which are strengthened whenever your content entertains or helps your customers. All other things being equal, people are more likely to buy from companies with whom they have relationships. Of course, this requires you to create content that people like – or even love.
You reach more buyers and customers, at lower costs.
Engaging content marketing is part of a natural conversation with current and potential customers, is relevant to their interests and behaviors, and builds a continuous story over time.
COMMUNICATION
IS ONE-WAY
SEEKS OUT CUSTOMERS
THROUGH TV, RADIO, BANNER, POP-UPS
COMMUNICATION
IS TWO-WAY
CUSTOMERS COME TO
YOU VIA SEARCH ENGINES,
SOCIAL MEDIA, REFFERALS
CUSTOMERS GET
NO ADDED VALUE
MARKETER RARELY
SEEKS TO ENTERTAIN
OR EDUCATE
CUSTOMERS GET
ADDED VALUE
MARKETER SEEKS TO
ENTERTAIN OR EDUCATE
CONTENT MARKETING
STRATEGIES
USE VISUAL ELEMENTS
To strengthen the engagement use visual elements such as infographics, charts, graphs, and relevant images and videos. This includes posting content on social media such as Instagram and Youtube.
CREATE CONTENT THAT IS ENTERTAINING
Make the content funny, shareable, and well written. The goal should be to create content that finds it way into everyday conversations.
CREATE CONTENT THAT IS EDUCATIONAL
By creating content that is educational to your customers, you build trust and come across as more confidence, as well as it leads to a higher engagement.
COLLABORATE WITH INFLUENCERS
Work together with an influencer and let them create content for your brand on social media. This boosts credibility and traffic as you attract the influencer's followers.
CONTENT MARKETING
BMW
MARKETING REQUIRES CONTENT
Social Media
For a good social media marketing, it is important to have valuable content to share.
SEO
Publishing quality content improves SEO.
PR
The most successful PR strategies are the ones that are not just about the business, but concerns itself around the topics that its customers care about.
Pay-Per-Click
For PPC to be effective it is important that it is supported by quality content.
Website
Great content is the key to increase traffic to your website.
Their original take on marketing sets them apart from other car manufacturers, and they have developed content such as films, advergames, virtual test drives etc. Most of their TV ads are sleek and in a higher quality than most car adverts, and they tend to focus on look, engine and technology which ties nicely with their slogans ; The Ultimate Driving Machine (USA, UK & Australia) and Sheer Driving Pleasure (Worldwide).
In the early 2000 BMW realised that a lot of their customers were spending more time on the Internet than watching TV. In fact 85% of BMW customers used the internet to do research about the car they were buying. Take note that this was before youtube and today’s social media, when the internet had less than 500 million users! It was therefore crucial for BMW to use the internet for advertising. However, instead of investing in pop-ups and banner ads, Jim McDowell (twiced named Marketer of the Year) decided to try something new in order to strengthen the brand’s PR status. Together with directors like David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club etc) they developed eight short films as part of the series «The Hire» with the famous actor Clive Owen as the main character. By using famous Hollywood names it generated a lot of talk and excitement. The aim was to not portray them as adverts, but instead focus on having an interesting story centered around the car. What BMW realised was that most people ignore ads, but 5 minute films can be engaging and remain stuck in people’s mind.
By creating these high quality, well executed, action-filled films, BMW offers its customers and fans content in the form of entertainment Through these films BMW was able to reach their customers without using the typical annoying ads and at the same time connect the car to premium people. This therefore also strengthens the idea that this car will gain you social capital (because you will drive the same car as Clive Owen) which creates a pull effect. In addition to this, these films strengthens the brand image as the Ultimate Driving Machine.
In 2019 BMW relaunched its website with the focus on content that could increase their flow of upper-class visitors.The website therefore includes interesting content around lifestyle, design, innovation and fashion. The goal of the website was to use a mobile, content-led approach will to attract more customers. After the new site was launched the website has already increased mobile visitors by 27%, and it is getting 49% more site visits through SEO. In addition to this the average user is now spending on average 3 minutes on the site. The content comes in a easy-to-digest format, and includes articles, videos, photography etc and nearly every article contains some sort of infographics.
CONTENT MARKETING
RITUALS
Rituals often uses their brand narrative in their marketing. They have created content centered around the different rituals that are meant to help improve your daily life. Through images, compelling text and videos they explaine their philosophy, and why it is important. In addition to this they have created several educational videos that explain and demonstrate how to use their different products.
Consumers today are much more aware of connections between inner harmony and the positive effects of outer beauty, and Rituals have developed an app to promote their philosophy, that highlights this holistic trend. The free app is split into two parts; The first part allowed its users to browse and buy products, whilst the other part is called calm down where users are offered free short yoga videos and three different mediations they can incorporate into their daily lives. Through this Rituals manages to become a very present brand in people’s lives, and by offering valuable content, for free, to its users builds trust and increases likeabilty.
CONTENT MARKETING
NETFLIX
What Netflix does very well is to keep the focus on the content. Most of its adverts and campaigns are to promote and create engagement around a TV show or new movie. In other words, Netflix does not use the brand name to sell its content, but it uses its content to sell its brand.
Netflix seems to have a way of making its content viral. It always tries to create content that is easily combined with the everyday conversations on social media, and it knows how to take advantage of the current trends. One example is how Netflix uses the trend of creating memes and gifs through hosting a page were the audience can find funny gifs from their favorite Netflix series. These gifs and memes are easy to share, or download, hence they quickly get posted around on the different social media platforms. To put it in a different way, making content that is «tweetable» so that users can easily engage. Their witty and authentic conversations voice is also an important part in their virality success.
Netflix’s use of content marketing is very successful due to the fact that they remember that content marketing is about creating a experience or a product that gets the conversation started, and gives the audience a possibility to interact and get engaged.