2012 seems to be the year of Content Marketing. It's everywhere. When you have global organizations such as Coca Cola committing their strategic and marketing resources to content marketing, it's a significant enough shift to warrant a deeper look. To me, it seemed like a repackaging of the term "Social Media Marketing", so I thought to investigate and share some of those findings here.
Content Marketing
This is a fairly recent term used to describe "the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases", which is really just a lofty way to say intelligent content development. Basic premise is to:
- Understand your audience (their likes, dislikes, behaviour, personality, etc.)
- Understand their content platforms preference (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
- Create compelling pieces of content (videos, posts, articles, stories, etc.)
- Release relevant pieces of content on appropriate channels (platforms)
- Engage consumers in order to have them interact with the content (read this)
That's really content marketing in a nutshell. Of course, a great deal of research, strategy and planning is needed in order to execute something like this without sucking. If you don't invest the effort into making your content strategy compelling and interesting, you might as well not even try. This is a game of high stakes for a sliver of consumer attention. All in order to develop relationships, create affinity and establish brand preference.
Dynamic Content Creation
In a marketing context, you'll see this term quite often and it really boils down to crowd-sourcing of content. Basically, the idea is to create a piece of content that your audience will then add onto with tags, comments, replies, photos or whatever else. OR... it might look like repository for consumer content. For example, a flickr group which caters to outdoorsy people who drive Toyota Tundra trucks. You'd create this in order to encourage and facilitate the creation of content around an idea, topic, brand or product with the goal of developing affinity.
Branded Storytelling
This is what I believe will be the next frontier for savvy marketers. It's not a new concept, but it has substantially evolved from smart ad copy you might see in a magazine. These days you're able to create a storyline which easily traverses multiple media and social networks. You are now able to weave a story that spans text, audio and video, all virtually seamless for the consumer. The idea is to create a story, a narrative where your brand plays a role OR acts as a hub for story telling. For example, this could look something like Travelocity's gnome - where users would take photos of the handsome fella on their vacations and then sharing that on the brand's blog, Facebook or other network with all the other travellers. Another recent example would be Kraft's brilliant Salty's Life campaign which has wound down significantly by now. But in its heyday, people were chatting with Salty on a regular basis, posting pictures, writing stories... engaging with the brand in a new and innovative way.
Coca Cola recently launched something called Content 2020 effectively taking a leap of faith away from traditional marketing and into content marketing. Rather then me harping on about what it is and how it works, here are a couple of really great videos that explain the concept in detail, including ideas about liquid content and so on.
We also cover the topic of Content Marketing in the latest episode of the Uncut Marketing Podcast, which you can listen to below OR find it on iTunes here.
What is your take on Content Marketing?