February 15, 2015
Content is king. Ever have that moment when you realize you got more sales from your article than you did from your advertising? That pretty much means you should look into content marketing as your top marketing tool. Content marketing is the fastest growing field in marketing.
Over 50% of marketers this year plan to increase spending on content marketing. It’s a valuable addition to your marketing portfolio.
So what exactly is content marketing? In short, it’s the
art of building a relationship with your customers. Here’s a solid definition from the
Content Marketing Institute:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Case Study: How We Designed Great Content That Went Viral
Here’s a content marketing case study that will show you how effective content creation can be. We designed blog content for an online health supplements company in our first few years in existence. Tasked with making vitamins, makeup and health supplements appealing, fresh and creative, we created 24 blog posts a week that incorporated three key factors: 1) trending topics 2) emotional marketing and 3) relevant SEO keywords. No small task! Creating fresh, hip posts such as “Five Ways Eyelash Extensions Helped Me Get Married” and “How Vitamin Supplements Are Really Adult Candy”, we helped bring our client to one of the top ranked websites on Google, which increased web traffic, page session duration and product sales. That’s what great content marketing can do: bring customers to your door, engage and inform them and then simply soft sell them!
You have wisdom. We have creativity. Together, you have a recipe for a great content marketing strategy (
Learn More). Here’s why content marketing works wonders and how it will change your marketing forever.
Ads are read for a few seconds. Articles last for minutes and more.
To quote ImaginePub, content marketing is a relationship; advertising is a one night stand. Especially in the 21st century. DVR customers are skipping commercials, newspapers are battling for online relevancy, web visitors click on ads less often, and
search ads are becoming less popular in a mobile world. This in no ways means advertising is dying; it simply means you need new ways to get the attention of customers. Content marketing solves that issue. Customers may skip over your App ad but are simply compelled to read about “13 Apps Every Jewish Guy Must Have.” They’ll sit and absorb your article for ten minutes and share it with friends. Ten minutes!
An ad for Matzo is ho hum; an article about “10 Ways To Use Matzo For Passover Like Never Before” simply piques interest. Content marketing engages your customer for longer and gives them more reasons to get your products.
You own your content. And it’s online forever.
When you place an ad in a newspaper, you’re pretty much renting space to promote yourself. The space is finite, the readership is finite and the results are limited. By creating content, you own everything you create, it’s unlimited in space, it’s unbound by a geographic region and it can go viral forever on social media. Why rent when you can own, right? Many Jewish media outlets are even geared to provide free editorial. If content is more valuable, which it is, and you can get content space for free, jump on it!
It’s got your personality written all over it.
The best way to gain more customers is through an emotional connection. Customers want to laugh, cry, dream, succeed and be inspired through your products. Ever notice on product labels that they have websites full of recipes? Their content helps shoppers feel creative, healthy and resourceful through their products. That’s why QVC is so successful; they sell products that help parents feel emotionally empowered, beautiful, and trendy. Content marketing lets you show your personality and connect emotionally with your customers. People share content when it moves them, when it shocks them, and when it inspires them. An advertisement has limited connection (one night stand, remember?) and certainly no more than your competition. Through content, you can connect in more emotional ways and build a relationship.
You get to focus on creating new…
… everything! Great content creates new information. It creates new uses and insights about your products. It opens up new perspectives in your customers. Basically, creative content opens up your business in more ways than traditional marketing. You’re not merely selling your products with an ad; you’re creating new opportunities for your products to be relevant and sold. We work with a food client who basically sells groceries. It’s a basic need so where can you go from there? Here’s where. We created an entire sequence of recipes that were printed in newspapers and posted online for one reason only: to position our food client as more than just groceries. With our content, they became an expert on Kosher food. And who wouldn’t trust and buy from the expert more often? Great content helped them create a relationship with customers and didn’t just go for the one-time buy. By creating new content, they created new selling opportunities online and upsold larger recipe orders in store. Creative content created a lot for them.
Content makes you cool.
The benefit of great content creation resides in it’s ability to go viral. To go viral, you need to have friends who will share it. The better your content, the more people share it, the more friends (or Likes or customers) you’ll gain… and the cooler your brand becomes. That’s why we create content for you that is ridiculously cool, fresh and unique. It’s similar to designing an ad; you can’t use Comic Sans font or outdated pictures to be considered a fresh business. You need a sharp slogan, creative logo, short compelling content and a fresh design if you want to resonate with the cool kids. Of course, informative, useful and emotional is an added bonus but the goal is to connect with as many people as possible. If your business needs a major dose of “coolness”, content creation is the “hottest” way to go.
LET’S SUM IT UP: Content marketing, the art of creating valuable content to attract customers, is one of the fastest growing fields in marketing and you need to add it to your marketing portfolio. It’s cool, it’s informative, it’s fresh and it leaves a bigger impact than an ad. If you invest in one new marketing area this year, content marketing should be it.
Let’s get started…
