What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a form of marketing that includes published blogs, videos, social media posts, newsletters, e-books, infographics and other material that will be distributed to a desired audience online or offline. Content marketing can help companies increase trust, loyalty, shareability, word of mouth and, of course, sales.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
We live in a very noisy world. We’ve gone from having one radio station and one TV channel to hundreds and millions of networks, podcasts, radio shows and YouTube channels. Content gives us an opportunity to find people who are interested in specific topics.
Good content marketing answers customers’ questions. Great content marketing builds trust and creates an emotional connection with customers. It helps you stand out from the competition, stay relevant, add value to customers and increase sales. It is important because it drives business results. Without it, a business competes purely on price, because customers do not see the value in a brand, only the cost.
What Is Our Process?
Before we create content, we first and foremost look at the product. We experience the product. If it is a hotel we may stay at the hotel to experience the brand, if it is a restaurant we will eat there and taste the food, if it is fitness we will try out the space, and if it’s retail we will buy the product, so that we encounter it the way a customer does.
Once we understand and know the product, we look at the story of the brand. If the brand doesn’t have a story we can create an authentic and emotional brand story that will help our content marketing activities. If the brand doesn’t want a new story then we work with what we have.
We will have a conversation with the owner about who our core target audience is, we will look at the current story of the brand, we will figure out a tone of voice for the brand, and we will interview brand clients to understand how they use the product and see the brand.
If we don’t know who the target audience is, we will identify our potential clients and understand what type of people we want to attract. Once we’ve done that, we create a comprehensive content strategy. This explains what type of content we need to create based on our goals. If our goal is to create brand awareness, we need to create this type of content, if our goal is to create trust, we need to add a different type of content into the mix. If we need to increase sales, we will need to create a different type of content. Different businesses have different goals, because although every business needs sales, not every business has the same brand equity (TGI Fridays has much more brand equity than a one-site vegan restaurant in Camden, for example).
Our content strategy will include what content we will be posting on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. We will detail which channels we will use to distribute our content, and our monthly, quarterly and yearly goals. To have a clear view of the progress we are making, we set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track and understand where we are succeeding, and areas for improvement.
In our content strategy we don’t just focus on selling the product. We focus on selling our story, our cause, and topics that are relevant to the industry. An example; if it’s a hotel we don’t just sell the room, we sell the experience of the city or the town. We may focus on the idea of writing a book there, or meeting new people in the town. If it’s a gym we don’t focus on the equipment but the end result of creating a new habit, and living a more disciplined life.
We always include topics other than the product that we can talk about, topics and issues that are relevant to the industry, and that add value to the potential customer. This is very important, because if our content speaks only about our product this type of content will be boring and forgettable, so we focus on answering questions for different customers in different parts of their buying journeys.
Once we have our content strategy agreed, we proceed to its execution. This is a very important aspect of content marketing. We can have great ideas, we can have fantastic ideas, but if the execution is poor we will not achieve our desired results. Our goal is always to create high quality and engaging content.
We will create a creative brief with one of our designers. This brief will help us understand exactly what we need to shoot, how we need to shoot, the aesthetics we need to have, how many pieces of content we will require for a particular month, and what type of models (if required) we need to have.
Once we have our brief, we will arrive with our team for the shooting day. Once we shoot, we will go back for postproduction, where we will edit, add audio, edit visuals and anything else that we need to complete in order to have a great piece of content. This shooting process is done every two months.
Once we have our content, we will start distributing it. Every day we will be publishing and monitoring all your social media accounts. It’s not just publishing on social media, it’s about interacting with your audience.
Every month we create reports where our clients can see the progress we make and how we are moving forward. The client has an option to add gross revenue to the reporting so he/she can see how content impacts the bottom line. The data helps us navigate and make instant changes where required.
Are you ready to create creative content? Drop us a line below and let’s have a chat.
