20% of your current customers will account for 80% of your future profits. That means you can’t afford to lose these guys. Here’s how Content Marketing will keep people coming back for your quality content.
Content Marketing is the way your company uses its content – videos, blogs, articles, graphics, photos – to capture your audiences interest in your products and services, without specifically linking it to your brand. Content that will genuinely help them in their everyday lives.
For example, a blog entitled “Five Best Pizza Toppings” posted by a restaurant. There’s no direct mention of the restaurant – just an assumed connection – it’s a restaurant, posting about pizza toppings – they must do pizzas!
And it works. Many of your customers are getting tired of traditional advertising. In late 2015, 198 million people had installed Ad Blocker on their computer. Your potential customers don’t want anything to interfere with their browsing – they want something tangible, something they can relate to and engage with. Even better – something that actually benefits their day to day lives.
Content Marketing does more than advertising alone could ever achieve. It gives you a platform to engage with your audience and show what your brand is all about.
A good example of a bit of Content Marketing that we’ve produced for one of our clients is the White Paper “A Simpler Britain” written by philosopher Alain de Botton, which we worked on for our friends over at Ikano Bank.
The booklet took ideas from The School of Life on simpler, easier living. It can be used as a one stop guide to simplifying your life. It’s not directly to do with banking, or Ikano, but Ikano’s involvement highlights the association between the brand and keeping things simple and fair.
You might have heard that Content Marketing is the new SEO – it’s overtaking SEO as the number one marketing priority. In reality – you can’t have good Content Marketing without SEO. Thankfully, it’s not as hard as it sounds.
The creation of useful content will lead to the natural use of keywords. It’ll lead to creating longer, more detailed posts. It’ll give value to your posts without the stress of retrospectively added SEO elements. Don’t throw all of your SEO plans out – Search Engine Optimisation and Content Marketing go hand in hand to maximise your business potential.
The most obvious way to utilise Content Marketing is through social media. Successful businesses rarely showcase their products blatantly – they show the consequences of those products. Take Adidas’ Instagram for example. Not a product shot in sight – it’s all good looking, successful people, who are potentially wearing Adidas (it’s not even a direct requirement).
This “lifestyle” approach makes the customer feel a certain, positive way. They then associate that feeling with the brand. It’s not rocket science. It’s psychology. If your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr , Pinterest and whatever else promote this fantastic content, you’re halfway there.
One of the ways to develop great content with certainty is Customer Journey Mapping. It’s a tool marketers use to get into the minds of their customers (in a metaphorical way rather than a Derren Brown way).
In the next few weeks, we’ll post another blog about how to deploy the CJM (yep, it’s got an acronym). So keep your eyes peeled and your Wi-Fi on if you want to learn how to market the pants off of your customers in an engaging way!
When it all comes down to it, what you’re really selling your customer is a way to solve their problem. If they associate your business with good advice, quality content and honesty, they’re more likely to come back.
To summarise, don’t rely on the hard sell. For more information, give us a call here at Arch where we can sort out all of your Content Marketing woes. That’s a hard sell. Oh, the irony.