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Content Marketing; Value and Relevance

The Content Marketing Institute defines Content Marketing as follows:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly—defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

There are two terms that are critically important in their definition:

Value and Relevance

Value is a completely relative term; what is valuable to one person is not necessarily valuable to another. This hints at why relevance is so paramount. Relevance is identifying a group of people based on their needs and creating, or providing, something that is valuable to them specifically.

Content marketing is a profoundly powerful way for brands to do just that. Brands are still grappling with the concept of adding value outside of their core service in order to build a loyal audience and have, instead, utilised their content platforms to “push product”  —  essentially, reworking traditional advertising executions in another format.

Generally, customers follow a process when purchasing. Many thought leaders have published their view of what that sales cycle is, but ultimately it is founded by five questions:

  1. What is preventing me from doing something? (Identifying a problem)
  2. What can I do about it? (Researching a solution)
  3. Is this the best solution for me? (Comparing solutions)
  4. Is it worth the money? (Consideration)
  5. Can I do that thing now? (Satisfaction)

Content isn’t just editorial either. Blendtec (above), for example, created a video series to show the power of its blenders. What do they blend? Random objects, and the channel has almost a million subscribers.

Probably one of the most successful examples is GoPro (above), with a video they created to promote its Hero 3 camera. It’s a five-minute-long commercial that was published on YouTube. People watched it by choice… over 42-million times.

What makes these examples powerful is that the brands have figured out how to add value over and above their product/service offering. When you’re reading about how to declutter your apartment, you naturally think about all the stuff in it. From there, insuring all your valuables is not such a big leap.

This is indicative of an intelligent content strategy, something that is less prevalent in the Turkish market.

Many brands in SA have recognised the importance of content and begun publishing, but content without a robust strategy is just a blog — — not doing pretty much in the way of adding to the bottom line. It’s vital to begin a content marketing venture with objectives; a strategy is the game plan on how to execute those objectives.

As we move out of the of the Information Age and into the Experience Age, brands need to think about how they are communicating to their clients. With so many options available, brands need to create marketing that consumers want to consume, not avoid.

There is only one metric that really counts: quality.

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