Content Development The Heart of Digital Marketing Campaigns
Ever heard the old saying “actions speak louder than words?”
Well, this saying is actually is applicable in digital advertising and marketing.
A company may claim their offers can resolve problems.
But another can perform a collaborative test with a third party and by using data prove that their offers resolve the problem efficiently.
Definitely, you will trust the latter company because objective data can never lie.
Content marketing focuses on the customers’ strong trust for test results instead of brand claims.
Copywriting can tell customers what the business can do.
However, detailed tests and research involving the brand’s offers can show customers its approach to solving problems.
This can lead to helpful tips and discoveries that can resolve day to day problems given their experience and expertise.
Written, video or audio, and image-based content can introduce positive experiences to audiences if they impart something of value.
For brands, helpfulness and value-adding content gives them an authoritative, professional, yet approachable appeal to consumers.
For this reason, the United States’ digital marketing industry’s focus on content can never be underestimated.
By 2017, content development and marketing budgets have increased.
In fact, compared to data from 2016, there has been a 75% spending increase on content marketing with majority (69%) of budgets developing video-based content.
Digital marketing company Business2Communityspeculates that content marketing will become a $300 billion industry by 2019.
This observation further reinforces the importance of content development and marketing for any business.
Content’s Untapped Potential
According to Curata, about 70% of in-house marketing professionals do not have a consistent content strategy, yet they have written plans for development and marketing.
This means a majority of digital marketers fail to unlock content development and marketing’s massive potential.
Think of it this way: popular YouTube channels receive over hundreds of thousands to millions in profit by only generating millions of views and a huge number of subscriptions.
These channels even receive bonuses from their sponsors who wish to have a segment in the channel for direct target audience communication.
If you apply this principle by generating helpful, entertaining, and value-adding videos that redirect to your brand, then you can generate a huge number of conversions.
Therefore, revenue from content marketing becomes bigger than popular YouTube channels.
You can do this by providing premium tangible offers in the form of products and services.
In addition, you also develop your brand’s presence, retention, and identity, allowing you to create a following of satisfied customers.
A single successful marketing campaign can create an efficient referral network built from your most loyal and advocating customers.
However, videos showing product or service demonstrations or simplified, entertaining research results are not the only ways to generate revenues and more loyal customers.
In fact, you can host conventions or sponsor a popular local or Internet event (provided these are relevant to your brand) to further build your brand and generate value-adding content.
And you can do all this by unlocking content’s potential by cultivating a campaign of your own.
Community, Authority, and The Transmission of ‘Goodwill’
Not all offers or services always work as intended.
Even if a brand is a recognized authority of a certain subject matter, high profile failures can still happen.
One good example is tech giant Samsung’s mishap over its groundbreaking smartphone.
However, if customers recognize the brand’s actions and continuous content updates as helpful and acts of goodwill, then they can create communities focused on the brand’s offers.
Communities are important because loyal customers who intend to raise the value and efficacy of the brand’s products or services automatically generate value-adding content and build the business’ identity.
Helpful and value-adding content shows the brand’s good intentions to customers. It also helps them create the following experiences:
- Convenience
- Satisfaction
- Luxury
- Refreshing Experiences
- Efficient Solutions
- Entertainment
A community helps them gain better audience insight and receive accurate feedback.
This allows them to update their existing offers and improve the overall experience for customers.
Brands can even create content based around the resolved and unresolved issues raised by the dedicated customer community to create more conversions.
With enough investment and a dedicated community that helps cut the rough edges of prototype products or services, there is no shortage of publishable content that helps improve a company’s brand identity, retention, and conversion rates.
Five Reasons You Should Invest In Content Development
Effective Brand Building
As mentioned earlier, content allows you to show what your business can do instead of making claims that your business can do something the audience expects.
Indeed, performing research and working with third-party suppliers to ensure the results’ accuracy can cost from small sums to hefty investments. However, the data uncovered will never lie.
Audiences will trust proven research results than lofty claims about products or services.
Therefore, a well-performed and executed experiment results in great audience loyalty, which leads to higher conversions compared to using materials for promotion and advertisement copy.
This point is reinforced in the second reason below.
Aside from data-driven content, brands can create audience rapport by injecting their personality into the mix. Apple is one great example of rapport builders through hosting Keynote conventions.
The video coverage of the event gives them enough content to publish and use as promotion.
Meanwhile, those invited to the event can feel special because they become first to know about the new products the company is about to release
Aside from multiple media outlets publishing about their Keynote events, Apple also reinforces the values, which won their audiences to become loyal advocates of their brand in the process.
The coffee chain Starbucks is another excellent example.
Instead of concentrating on the high quality coffee they serve to their loyal customers, they stress their brand’s significance to a person’s lifestyle.
In other words, if you are drinking a Starbucks coffee every morning, then you’re “in” and better off than a fraction of the world’s population.
Data-Backed Claims For Self-Promoting Content
Instead of telling people about your offers’ capabilities, persuading them through actions is the best way to go. You can measure actions through data.
Here is a simple analogy.
You have a lemonade stand, and you are competing against a dozen other stands.
Everyone is shouting their lemonade is the best because they only use the freshest lemons possible.
Others say they can serve lemonade within thirty seconds (a truly lofty claim).
You can claim to be better than your competitors are.
However, this claim will just drown in the noisy sea that does not make you loud enough for audiences to give attention.
However, if one customer gives a positive opinion on your lemonade, not only will it feel nice on your behalf, but it opens many opportunities for growing your audience.
You can ask them to ask people they know to trust your brand (referral marketing).
You can also ask about the positive aspects they found in your lemonade and possible suggestions they have to make it better (data survey).
In fact, highlighting the process of this lemonade data survey makes for interesting content.
Because you have proof of research through the published content process, audiences believe you have taken “the long road” to make your lemonade brand have the best taste it can be.
As a result, you did not make a claim. Instead, you allowed your data to show proof that you are acting out of improving your offer’s capabilities to the benefit of your future customers.
Value-Adding and Enriching
Using the lemonade example, the data survey you perform is useless if it is not value adding to your audiences.
A great way to know if you’re adding value is to understand your brand’s customer impression.
As a lemonade company, they expect you to have great-tasting lemonade that is refreshing.
In short, all your research and improvements must focus on making this a reality and even better as time passes.
The content is enriching because your audience experiences your research results firsthand.
However, if you focus your content only through data, its academic value-adding aspect can lose audience interest over time.
Injecting some personality in the form of humor, holiday-themed posts, or a-day-in-the-life written or visual content builds rapport and creates a pace change for your audience.
In its own way, the non-academic yet entertaining content touches into the brand’s “human” side, which also shows that it befriends customers and does not only aim to sell.
Forging your respective brand personality is actually crucial for your content development and marketing campaigns.
Going back to the lemonade stand example, interesting non-academic content can be how-to text, image, or video content.
You can inject your brand’s personality by making the videos hilarious, colorful, or exciting in its own way.
Doing so also introduces a unique and memorable experience that allows your content to create retention, which is a vital part of brand development and marketing.
Opinions and Perspectives Can Help
In many points during your content marketing campaign, you may run out of interesting topics to talk about.
Fortunately, you can talk about almost anything as long as it remains relevant to your brand.
For example, the audio company iZotope is renowned for its great audio processing software products.
Unlike many of its competitors, it has a humorous personality.
Instead of often posting about their professional users’ tips on product use, they also post memes that poke fun at their products and the audio technology industry in general.
It has significantly improved their engagement.
Aside from using memes, expressing opinions or perspectives on certain trending topics is also a great way to stay relevant.
For example, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, answered an interview about gender equality. The topic has no bearing on their tech brand.
Yet it introduces the company’s belief and values regarding social and cultural topics that affect the world.
It is still relevant because Elon Musk and the people behind his brands are still humans affected by the same issue.
Even Google and other search engines prioritize brands that stay relevant and consistently post useful content.
You may find that sites and social media pages which lack updates rarely make the first search engine results pages.
Introducing topics that are non-academic yet related to your brand reinforces to audiences the idea that despite your accomplishments and excellent offers, you are still a brand that is conscious about its surroundings and not just focused on profits.
Measurable and Upgradeable Performance (SEO, SMM, Etc.)
Content is more than just a branding and marketing tool.
It is also essential in measuring your audience’s reaction to different types and pieces of content.
For example, MotoCMS cannot make a conclusion that visual content is better than text-based content if they did not use content in the first place.
The performance of content and your audience’s perception is measurable, which makes improving their quality easier in the process.
Facebook and YouTube video analytics allow you to measure the time audiences spent watching your content.
The data tells a story and allows you to identify possible obstacles the audience encountered that deterred their interest.
If the average suggests the drop-off time to be in the same area, then it is safe to assume there is something direly wrong in the video’s area that needs improvement.
Website audits also make it easy to measure the performance of website blog posts especially if they have crucial roles in your content funnel.
Meanwhile, social media posts allow you to see the organic reach of your content, allowing you to make precise decisions on using pay-per-click advertising to improve your brand visibility and leveraging your content to get loyal customers.
You can use the data to improve your future campaigns and create more conversions.
However, make sure to use a reliable content auditing platform to measure your current content’s performance.
Conclusion
Content is definitely the heart of any website.
Without anything that adds value and only telling consumers about your brand’s capabilities will not persuade them to consider your offers.
Content allows your actions to speak louder than the competitor’s copies.
Using data, you can urge customers to convert.
On the other hand, opinion posts and hilarious personal content introduces brand rapport and creates a unique experience for your customers.
In turn, various types of content reinforce your brand’s identity, allowing you to get noticed and increase your conversions efficiently.
