Content Marketing
Content marketing has leapt to the forefront of U.S. marketing this year. The reason? Marketers have woken up to the fact that consumers and business buyers are now researching products and services online, long before ever engaging with a sales person. In short, marketers have lost control of the selling process. To regain influence early in the selling process, marketers are learning that they must provide a steady stream of useful information to help consumers make their purchase decisions and–one hopes—influence the sale in the marketer’s direction. Hence, the arrival of a new discipline called “content marketing.”
While content marketing is still in its infancy, a number of best practices have grown up around it. First of all, marketers now understand that they need to behave like publishers. This is a new role for them. Second, they must develop content that is relevant, useful, authoritative, and—contrary to a marketer’s natural instincts—not sales-y. At least it needs to appear to be objective. Third, the content must be made available to customers and prospects in a wide variety of venues, and this is where social media comes in. While content can be posted on a company website, it is perfectly suited to distribution through social networks, micro-blogs, Q&A sites, video and photo sharing sites, and all the other social media platforms that are springing up like mushrooms.
In fact, content marketing is so closely linked to social media that some marketers are asking themselves: “Which should I develop first, a content strategy or a social media strategy?” If you talk to the experts at the Content Marketing Institute, a Cleveland Ohio-based think tank (contentmarketinginstitute.com), they will tell you—no surprise—that the content strategy must come first.
The content tells the interesting stories about your brand. The social media strategy then becomes a delivery system for the content.
Here is how this seems to work today:
- Consumers poke around online and run into your brand. The content you place there thus becomes a key tool by which consumers evaluate your brand.
- If they like what they see—or hate it—consumers will share with their friends through social media.
- So content on social media is fast becoming a new marketplace in itself, where awareness, interest, desire and action—all the steps in the marketing chain—take place, in a big jumble of interactivity.
Burt’s Bees case example
Burt’s Bees is a fast-growing skincare company that early on saw the need for active content marketing via social media, particularly Facebook. Their content includes quizzes and video, free sample offers, and links to publicity from consumer magazines. According to Melissa Sowry, the content and social media manager who joined the company in 2010, the beauty products category particularly benefits from social media because it is naturally suited to word of mouth sharing of recommendations and product comments.
Another content focus area is sharing stories about the Burt’s Bees company values, like its commitment to Habitat for Humanity and behind-the-scene looks at how they select product ingredients.
One technique that particularly drives interaction is posting a question on the Facebook product page. Questions like “What are you thankful for?” and “What makes your lips like nobody else’s?” have garnered hundreds of responses each. The result is a growth at the Burt’s Bees Facebook fan base from 98,000 to more than 370,000.
What marketers must do
So, where does this leave marketers? The first job is to create a plethora of useful, relevant content, readily available for distribution. The key is to think like an old-fashioned PR professional, and ask: “What information can I create that my audience wants to see?” In consumer marketing this may take the form of articles, contests and videos, often with news appeal, or involving favorite celebrities. And in business marketing, it will be solutions to business problems, in the form of ebooks, white papers, research reports, or how-to videos.
Companies are cataloguing the content into massive libraries, sortable by target audience, format, purpose and date, so marketers can quickly access useful material, and also fill in any gaps by commissioning fresh content as needed.
The rules of social media marketing are evolving quickly. But here are some current guidelines for how to take advantage of the power of content marketing in the social media environment:
1. Identify the locations where your customers congregate online, and join those communities.
2. Actively listen to the conversation.
3. Identify the influential voices in these communities.
4. Create a set of tactics to influence the conversation.
5. Respond quickly to comments about your brand.
6. Invest in the resources needed to produce and distribute the content consistently over time.