If you have any interest at all in digital marketing, websites and SEO, you’ll have heard plenty about content – and great content in particular. ‘Great content’ improves your search visibility. Promoting your great content through social networks and influencers earns you traffic, trust and authority.
So far so good. The content marketing concept is easy to understand and I’m sure you can see how it might work for your business. But how many really clear definitions have you seen of ‘great content’? What constitutes ‘great’ for your audience?
And before you get around to worrying about whether it’s great or not I think there’s a more fundamental question about its purpose. What, exactly, do you want content marketing to do for your business? Is the purpose behind your content as unfathomable as the purpose of Stonehenge?
There is, of course, a universal objective of winning more sales. But how will content get you there? If you don’t have clear answer to this question you could end up randomly throwing out content hoping that something will stick.
The Perfect Ice-Cream
I sometimes think of content marketing as being a bit like ice-cream sundaes. Lots of people like chocolate sauce, nuts, strawberries, cream, bananas, fudge pieces, toffee sauce. Put all of these in and you’ll have an ice-cream that everyone loves, right?
Well, no. Because some people also hate each of those things. By trying to please everyone you’ll end up with something nobody will consume.
One style or ‘flavour’ of content doesn’t work for every business. And to work out which flavour you need, you have to came back to the purpose of the content: whose tastes are you trying to satisfy?
A bit like Neapolitan you can break it down into 3 flavours, or 3 fundamental purposes for content marketing.
How content marketing got us all eating sun-dried tomatoes
For our first approach let’s go back to a time before websites, social media… and sun-dried tomatoes. A bit of a food theme going on here.
Back in the 80s Sainsbury’s and Delia Smith cooked up a novel way to promote new products. For non-UK readers, Delia Smith is a famous TV cook – I’m sure you have an equivalent.
The process worked something like this: Delia would feature a new ingredient in a recipe on her TV programme (and subsequent book); then, the next time you visited Sainsbury’s, lo and behold, the ingredient had magically appeared on the shelves together with point-of-sale advertising. So it was with the tomatoes.
Younger readers may find this hard to imagine but sun-dried tomatoes were once something that you only bought in specialist delis (if you had even heard of them, that is). Thanks to being featured in a Delia Smith programme, the UK supply of sun-dried tomatoes ran out almost overnight and they subsequently became a feature on every supermarket shelf.
A traditional advertisement for sun-dried tomatoes would probably have had little impact. It certainly wouldn’t have caused the spike in demand that we saw at the time.
By showing it being used in the context of entertainment, to create something we all desire (a tasty meal), they succeeded in creating both awareness and demand. I didn’t know it at the time but this was my first experience of content marketing.
Sainbury’s was also experimenting with celebrities (in the days before celebrities and chefs were the same thing), cooking a quick meal in an advert to show off various ingredients.
Now we can all do it
With social media and widespread internet use, the opportunities to use this approach are multiplied many times. They are also available to businesses without big advertising budgets or celebrity endorsements.
By creating content that shows your product or service being used to provide a benefit or create enjoyment, you can produce something more engaging and powerful than a traditional advert. Get it right and you can also get customers and advocates to do your promotion for nothing.
For a more mundane example you can look at electrical spares retailers with handy videos showing how to replace parts of ovens and dishwashers. I recently bought and fitted a new heater element for my oven just because an online video showed me how easy it was. Previously I might just have bought a new cooker.
Building a Tribe
Another approach that is successful for many B2C brands is to create content that makes people want to identify with your brand. Often this reflects a lifestyle that people aspire to.
You might argue that Red Bull’s sponsorship of extreme sports is no different from how cigarette companies used to sponsor motor racing or how many brands choose to sponsor sports teams. This would be missing the point. Red Bull creates a lot of content around these sports and also owns some of the media that publish the content (ie its website and social media channels).
They are not selling their fizzy drink so much as identification with a lifestyle, and through that with a brand.
Take look at the John Lewis Christmas adverts too. How many products do you see? Do you find out anything at all about the business or its stores?
They are creating nice little films that sell identification with a set of values and a sense of belonging. The John Lewis ‘tribe’ if you like. And look how many times those videos get shared on social networks (for free) by loyal members of the tribe.
There are plenty of less glossy examples like Dollar Shave that sell attitude, just as much as a product.
So who would want to join your tribe? What values attract them? A what type of non-advertising content will appeal and get then sharing? Answer those questions and your on the way to some great content.
Creating Trust
This is the content space that B2B companies need to claim.
The internet makes it easy for businesses to find the vast majority of products and services they need. Technology has freed us from the constraints of our geography and traditional networks. Google can find us anything we need.
And what we value most of all is somebody we can trust. Somebody who has demonstrated that they understand our needs, wants and difficulties before we’ve even spoken to them.
Traditional marketing boasts about capabilities. Content marketing demonstrates specific competence, empathy and practical application.
Content marketing also shows generosity and openness, which are appealing traits.
The key with this flavour of content is to genuinely see the world through your would-be customers’ eyes. You can then focus on their need for answers and help, rather than your need for more sales.
If you understand the questions potential customers are asking, and concentrate on providing the clearest, most comprehensive and honest answers to those questions that you possibly can, you will be well on the way.
What’s your Objective?
If you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there, as the saying goes. Actually, I believe that if you don’t know where you’re going every road takes you nowhere. Content needs a purpose and your business needs a clear objective to guide what you publish.
Once you’ve worked out what you’re trying to achieve through content marketing, you can then worry about the media you use and how to make it ‘great’.
Richard Hussey
Copywriter and content marketing specialist