On April 5th 2016 Partech Shaker hosted an event dedicated to content marketing. Content has become the fuel of marketing. For marketers, the production of engaging content is an everyday challenge, as well as its distribution on the relevant channels. Because it's so time-consuming, the use of dedicated tools can be crucial. Benoit Lamy from ScoopIt based his presentation on the stakes of producing and distributing qualitative content. He also presented some best practice and quick win solutions to manage this strategic topic.
1. Content has become the fuel of online marketing
Content is crucial to online marketing, especially when it comes to attract new prospects and feed them with news from the brand. Content also enables marketers to engage with clients and improve the brand image. Indeed, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s report, the main goals of content marketing for marketers are brand awareness (84%), lead generation (83%) and engagement (81%).
However, marketers tend to have difficulties to create content. According to the same report from the Content Marketing Institute, only 44% of the interviewed marketers have clarity on content marketing success while 34% of them do not and 21% are unsure. Their doubts often come from the high costs of content marketing. For instance, it takes approximately 3 to 6 weeks to produce a video which costs from $3 000 to $150 000 in total. Even for a blog post, it usually takes 2 to 4 man hours during 1-3 days. Moreover, it is sometimes complicated to decide where to promote creative content online. Content can be declined on an increasing number of social media that are sometimes expensive.
2. Marketers need to figure out how to generate maximum content marketing ROI
How to measure return on investment of a content marketing strategy? The idea is to balance the costs of production (outsourcing, time spent on it, distribution…) and the benefits you gain from it (brand image, opinion leader status, leads, revenues, SEO, conversion…). Therefore, the best way to generate ROI is to produce cheap and fast marketing content with significant impacts.
A relevant lean content marketing strategy enables to reduce costs and expand revenues considerably. Based on a thoughtful strategy, marketers should produce and broadcast content, then amplify its impact on social media. Yet they have to think beyond those 3 steps. They need to analyse whether and how the strategy brings ROI in order to think about a new plan.
Producing content marketing might be easier/cheaper than you think. As a matter of fact, marketers should for example think about the Top 30 questions that prospects could ask them. When prospects drive into the “conversion tunnel”, they surely have many questions. In order to do that, it is crucial to define your personas, listen to your customers and collect all the questions during sale. You may not realise it, but by providing useful advice and sharing your opinion on a subject to your prospects, you actually create content. Be careful though, this strategy only works if your answers are impartial and trustworthy.
3. How to organise your content?
Content marketing must first and foremost be used to convert prospects into customers. To do so, the strategy need to be based on 3 pillars: 1) hub of content, 2) distribution, 3) landing pages. How do these pillars work together? The hub, devoted to animate and retain the audience, provides content to distribution in order to publish them on social media, blogs or resource centres. Through “Call To Action” buttons, content attracts the prospects to the landing pages.
More contents lead to more inbound leads (leads through content). Hence marketers need to be organised and constantly post something online to generate inbound traffic. Inbound lead should not be taken lightly as you have 758 times more chances of closing an inbound lead than an outbound lead (that you went to get with telemarketing, cold calling etc.).
Last but not least, do not chose quantity over quality. And vice versa. Marketers must work with both. According to Marcus Sheridan, Founder of The Sales Lion, “most of the average contents published online will definitely have more impact than fantastic content that is never going to be published. The solution is to produce content regularly in order to get better with time”. The best way to do that is to define objectives specific to each social channel and publish on a regular basis. On the contrary, publishing white papers or e-books from time to time without a clear strategy should definitely not be a solution.
4. How to define a proper lean content marketing strategy?
First of all, and before starting producing content, marketers should define what the audience is interested in: we call it content curation. Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Researches are vital to understand what works online and what does not.
Tools are at your disposal to share existing content in a different format. Graphics can be converted to blog posts for instance, and vice versa. According to Mark Traphagen’s experience, Manager at Online Marketing, “we started sharing all of our content multiple times and we discovered that traffic on the posts was almost as good as the 1st share”. Finally, marketers should analyse whether each post was successful or not by looking at traffic, amplification, leads etc.
To sum up, content marketing is the fuel of online marketing as content enables customers and prospects to be aware of the brand and what it stands for. The internet is increasingly becoming a private sphere where ads are not welcomed. One internet user out of ten have installed an ad blocking app on their computer in France. It is one out of five in the United Kingdom. In this context, marketing content seems to be the solution, provided that a well thought out strategy has been set up upstream.
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