Psychologists and economist Herbert Simon first articulated the importance of attention as a scarce resource in modern society. In a digital economy where consumer's attention is limited and information is overabundant, marketers cannot just create and send out more marketing messages and hope it would attract the customers. Much like in interpersonal communication, what you say matters, how you say it matters more. In content marketing, brands create or sponsor original content to engage and build deeper connections with consumers. It is an effective inbound marketing tactic to attract attention and build brand awareness. When you create content, you're providing free and valuable information to your audience, attracting potential consumers to your website, and retaining existing customers through quality engagement. Marketing content is not just blogs, TikTok videos, Instagram posts, or sponsored native ads. It is the whole of the specific forms of media messages. Content creation must be strategic, consistent, and disciplined. You wouldn't want to build a house without a blueprint or cook a new dish without a recipe. So there should be no content creation without a plan. A well-developed content strategy takes your business goals and then uses media content as a primary means to achieve those goals. A good content strategy is built around following key questions like these; first, who is your audience? Remember that a content-based marketing strategy aims to reach prospective customers by speaking to them as being information and media content consumers. To achieve this goal, you will need to switch between the mindset of a promoter and that of a media producer and publisher. To do this, you should first think like a marketer and start by identifying and understanding your target customers. Who are they? Are they new leads or existing contexts? Where are they on their consumer journey? What are some of their product and brand related interests, questions, and concerns? You'll then switch your mindset to think like a media producer and see your target consumers as media audiences. Based on what you know about your target consumers, what kind of media content do they like to consume? Are they podcast listeners or blog readers? Are they motivated self-learners? Are they Facebook users or Instagram users? Do they use TikTok or Twitter? Do they watch a lot of YouTube videos? Developing a variety of content types to be delivered on multiple media platforms will help you engage different audiences you have in mind and reach everyone your company does business with. The second key question for developing a content strategy is, what problem will you be solving for your audiences? Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your customer has. Your content should inform and educate your audience through this problem as they identify and address it. A problem-product-content alignment could seamlessly boost your brand awareness and credibility without explicit persuasion. It will help establish a deeper connection and trust in your audience. A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product. Those still figuring out their main challenges and those already using your product to overcome these challenges. Your content should reinforce the solutions you're offering and make your customers more qualified users of your product. The next question is, what makes you unique? Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours. The same audience is also likely being targeted with similar ads, information, and content or marketing messages from your competitors. This means, you must consistently build the marketing content around your distinctive brand identity. One of the biggest mistakes in content marketing is to create content around an industry buzz instead of your brand's position and strengths. A funny YouTube video of a dog chasing a branded product may gain a large audience quickly. But unless this is a product for pets or your sole marketing goal is to build universal brand recognition, the video content does not help develop deep level connections with your target consumers. The fourth key question you should ask in building a content marketing strategy is, what forms will your content take? Will you be creating a video? If so, will it be long or short? Will it involve animations, special effects, or heavy editing, and post-production? Are you writing an article? What form of writing will you follow? Storytelling, instructional, testimonial? Will you need to create infographs , tables, and illustrations? How about data visualization? Having identified the topics you want to take a position on, you must determine which format to budget for. Your selection of content format should not be based on convenience and creative interest, but your target audience's media use behavior and your communication goals. For example, a B2B company that makes specialized instruments for a specific industry, probably should not create TikTok videos or Instagram posts to engage their customers. It is more appropriate for this company to develop in-depth and educational articles or instructional videos around their products. In ideal scenario, your content strategy should drive budget and hiring decisions, not the other way around. The next critical question you must ask is, what channels will you publish on? Just as you can create content in different formats, you will also have various channels you can publish on. Channels can include your own properties, such as your website and blog. Also, audio and video streaming services, such as podcasts and YouTube, and social media properties, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The same piece of content can also reside on multiple platforms across different channels. For example, a good tactic for video content marketing could be to create a long video for YouTube, and then edit several short versions of the video for social media channels. Where you publish the content need not be the only option for promoting it. In fact, cross-platform promotion is critical to ensure that the audience can discover your content. A sound strategy in content marketing is to create content around the same theme in several formats, and publish them on different channels. There are no good or bad content marketing channels, only appropriate and inappropriate ones. A long instructional video is not ideal to be posted on social media platforms. An overly cheerful product endorsement may permanently damage the credibility of a blog site, if it is perceived to be inauthentic and ingenuine. Selecting the appropriate content in the proper format for the appropriate channel to engage the right audience requires strategic thinking, careful coordination, and knowledge about the advantage and disadvantages of different communication modalities and media platforms. Finally, you should ask, how will you manage content creation and publication? Figuring out how you will create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It is crucial for a content strategy to know who's creating what, where it's being published, and when it's going live. For instance, your business goal might include increasing brand awareness. To achieve this goal, you might implement a content strategy integrated with your search engine optimization or SEO efforts. The theme and keywords of the content should match the search keywords you want your customer to use for discovering products or services. Good content marketing is not a one-time campaign. It's return on investment should not be measured by short-term increases in sales volumes or revenue. The cost of maintaining a content-based marketing strategy can be high, as it not only includes its products, but also the cost of continuous monitoring and re-evaluation. New business owners with a limited marketing budget should adopt a nice to have, but don't be a hero principle in content marketing. Start with articles and blogs on your own website and build a small but loyal audience to this content. Try to promote this content on your social media channels to grow your followers. Then cautiously create some native content for social media to gauge the reception. Many companies make a mistake by ambitiously creating lots of content in a short period. They then quickly face the reality that the effort is not sustainable and eventually abandon the effort. Remember, content promotion requires a marketing strategy on its own. You don't want to split your marketing budget to promote your main products and your content, and then lose sight of your main objective. Let's look at two examples of a winning content marketing strategy. First, let's look at how a Fortune 100 company consistently used content marketing to engage its stakeholder for more than a 100 years. Nearly a century before the Internet and social media, farm equipment giant John Deere, used a content marketing to build deep and long-lasting relationships with its customers. The company founded The Furrow, its own brand magazine to produce informative content that keeps farmers and other agricultural stakeholders on the cutting edge of the agriculture industry. The Furrow's first issue was printed in 1895. It's circulation grew to reach over four million consumers at its peak in 1912. Although the magazine contained ads for the big green tractors, the publication is better known for its articles and photography on things its audience cares about. Today, The Furrow is an online magazine and continues to publish original articles and stories and has a reach of over half of a million loyal subscribers. The 100-year old lesson for digital age marketer is that audiences are always searching for accurate sources of information. The modern audience is no different. By helping people becoming better at what they do, brands can engage consumers in a meaningful way that could lead to trust and loyalty. Next, let's see how our startup company utilized content to aggressively grow its market share and revenue in a short period. Founded in 2012, Blue Apron is an American home cooked delivery service. The weekly boxes contained pre-ordered ingredients and suggested recipes that must be cooked by hand by the customer at home. The company grew 500 percent in 2015 and it became a publicly traded company in 2017. Much of this early success was attributed to successful content marketing strategies. Blue Apron wanted to get subscribers excited about recipes before showing up at their door. Creating a more satisfying product experience. To do this, they create educational and fun cooking content, including recipe histories, cooking techniques, and kitchen time savers on social media platforms such as Facebook. With this method, they have engaged millions of fans and followers with a small marketing budget. Beyond engaging a large audience and creating a better experience, educational content allowed Blue Apron to form more meaningful relationships with its subscribers. They became the go-to source for anything kitchen related, building trust and loyalty among their customers. It doesn't matter whether it is a century old enterprise or a rapidly growing new brand. Producing high-quality content to meet consumer needs can help companies build trust with the audiences and succeed over the long haul.
