There’s a confusion going on in the marketing world. Content, without marketing, is not “content marketing”. It’s content creation. There’s a difference. Those waking up to the content craze, that hit our shores from the States in last couple of years, have only taken on part of the message. You only have to read the digital marketing blogs to witness the surge in those taking on the content part of the mantra – but forgetting all about the marketing side of the equation.
The idea behind content marketing is that the content you create needs a purpose, a reason to exist. And generally speaking there should be two types. Branded content – that’s created purely to engage with an audience with subtle mentions of the brand and services it provides. And then specific, targeted content aimed at the customer (B2B or B2C) once you’ve identified their interests.
Sounds simple. Well it is. But lots of marketing teams are still measuring themselves on output rather than impact. Content, to be part of “content marketing” needs to fulfil a purpose. Brands and companies do not have the luxury that traditional publishers do. Their content ultimately needs to feed into a sales funnel. And follow the three Cs principle of: converting content into customers.
Read more: Time for an editorial approach?
In a B2B world this means creating a blog that provides engaging and insightful content on a particular topic. Within this, there will be useful how-to tips, mini video explainers, endless infographics and best practice whitepapers to download. All for free. These have all been dreamed up and are the brainchild of the content creation teams – aimed at enticing users on to their sites and keeping them coming back for more.
Now for this content to turn into content marketing – it needs to do its job: capture the user’s patterns and, with help of landing pages, their identification. This is where the marketing part of content marketing starts to kick in. Once a person has been identified and their interests have been revealed by their online habits and click-throughs the marketing automation services, by the likes of Marketo, Eloqua and innovative services like Act On, can start to play their part.
These technologies can identify the user’s interests and then serve up the second type of content, more specific and aligned to the user’s needs and wants. This can happen in real time, with content personalization tech like Maxymiser or Evergage (depending on your budget), or via email with the already mentioned marketing automation services above.
Unsurprisingly the companies selling marketing software as a service or marketing automation systems are the best examples of how this works in practice. The mighty Salesforce does it well – with its Social Success microsite. It’s full of best practice advice on the social-powered enterprise and follows up its users with specific, targeted content.
Now for the B2C marketers their branded content needs to work in a similar way to the initial B2B content, but not interrupt the sales process. So the blog has less prominence and we see a greater emphasis of visual content being created to feed the various social media channels – which engages potential customers and then draws them from an external source onto the retailer’s site. Once on the website the user’s behaviour will be tracked by sophisticated content personalization tech and new targeted content will be served up to drive conversions.
Fashion sites are leading the way and can teach the online B2C world a thing or two about content marketing. ASOS, the youth fashion brand, has fully embraced this method of content marketing and its ever-expanding empire into Asia and beyond is testament that it really works. It plays the usual content marketing games of posting on its Facebook page snaps of fashionable celebrities at London Fashion Week, style files of how to wear its clothes and tips on how not to blow the budget on clothes. All great and engaging stuff.
But more importantly, it entices its brand and Facebook fans to go back to its main site, where the content marketing personalization machine really starts to work. Once on ASOS’ site the potential customers are then shown content that aligns to what they were looking at before they came on to the site. It will also recognize if they’re a repeat customer and serve up content matched to their browsing preferences and purchase history.
ASOS’ chief exec, Nick Robertson, recently said that the secret to their success is serving up what their customers really want. He told the Telegraph:
“We see online being a more relevant shopping experience. I want to know what you’re looking for before you get there. I know what you’ve browsed, your save for laters, your size you’ve returned, what you’ve kept and what colours you prefer – so when you experience ASOS it should be more relevant to what you’re looking for.”
If this all sounds a little daunting, it need not be. The new SaaS marketing automation services and personalization technologies are clamouring for business and are constantly trying to outsmart each other by creating accessible, user-friendly tech – that doesn’t require a techy person to use. They’ve been designed for marketing minds, for small, agile teams that can work on the fly and in real time.
By the way, I haven’t been paid by any of these SaaS providers to promote their services. It’s just a fact, that large, medium or small companies, with whatever the budget should use their great content more effectively to take customers down a sales funnel. It’s about thinking smarter about content and what’s it’s being created for.
Juliet Stott is a partner at content marketing agency, White Horse Digital