How To: Stop Marketing Content And Start Content Marketing
An energy drink may very well have funded one (incredibly ballsy) man’s dream to freefall from space, but for most businesses and brands, content marketing will remain a firmly grounded affair. Provided that you have a strategy in place, that is.
Why? Because without one, you’re probably not in the content marketing game – you’re merely marketing content.
In last week’s MeetTheBoss roundtable with the likes of Rebecca Jones, Head of Marketing at BBC Worldwide and Robyn Doyle, Head of eCommerce Strategy for Dixons Retail discussing the next wave of content marketing strategies, it was Stuart Wilson, Head of Marketing for Retirement Solutions at LV=, who took the reigns in simplifying what a lot of businesses – both in B2B and B2C – seem to glance over.
“There’s a difference between content marketing and marketing content,” he offered. “The former is strategic and interactive as a process; the latter is more about pushing out as much content to people as possible.”
In. A. Nutshell, Stuart. So how do you make it happen? Here’s three points of reference to turn your content into a marketing machine (and maybe take it out of the stratosphere):
Without a story, your content has no direction and you have no specified audience – even if you think you do. Why? Because you’ve provided no emotional link between your content and brand. As Stuart explained, “for me in particular, content marketing is about helping us tell our story in a better way. It’s not about ‘flogging’ the product, but about helping to tell the story of our proposition.”
To avoid ‘flogging’ your product (and indeed your content) find out what your proposition’s story is. Identify what story your audience wants to become part of. Then create a best-fit story strategy to combine the two.
Once you’ve got your story, you need a voice to narrate it – and that voice is so much more than just your content. We’ve all heard the much overused phrase “content is king”, but our friends over at iStrategy would add, ‘if content is king – then context is its kingdom’.
Where are you placing your content? Is it solely online? What social channels (if any) work best and why? What conversations are your customers having on those channels? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to finding your voice – Insight180 have done a good job of listing plenty more – but it’s important that this takes as much priority as your content creation. You wouldn’t turn up to give a formal dinner speech wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sombrero, would you?
We all know that when it comes to the digital frontier – be it community building, content marketing, social media and pretty much everything in between – there is no finish line. There are campaign deadlines and milestones, sure, but you don’t switch off your audience when you’re done. As another roundtable attendees rightly said, “You have to build the monster, then you have to feed it”.
How much you feed that monster will dictate how big it grows – but it’s what you feed it that dictates its strength. A balanced diet of the right content, a consistent narrative and emotional cues will all help breed better engagement and keep that all important conversation going.
To request attendance for our next content marketing roundtable – or to find out what else we’ve got on offer– head on over to our Roundtable Page.
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Adam has interviewed over 450 chief executives from Adidas to Zappos. He has spoken on communication, leadership, and innovation at several major conferences, for organisations as diverse as CA and CeBIT, and is Master of Ceremonies for a number of brilliant business events.