What is content marketing about?
You have most likely heard the term ‘content marketing’ banded around, especially in recent times, and be wondering “what on earth is content marketing about and how we can we use it in our business, we sell chest freezers?!” well there was a perfect example to help you with this on BBC2 last week, Thurs 24th April on ‘Digby Jones: The New Troubleshooter”. In this episode, Digby Jones visited the business Ebac, an electronics manufacturer in County Durham.
The company had traditionally made and sold Dehumidifiers and water coolers and employs over 200 staff. It recently bought the assets of a liquidated company Icetch Freezers Ltd. and as a result had built a new production line from scratch, re-launching the chest freezer brand Norfrost.
Lord Digby soon established all of this had been done with little research or knowledge into the marketplace or potential customers. Time was ticking, money was being spent and sales were slow.
One of the recommendations he made was to profile and identify their typical or ideal customer through market research. Once this had been done they identified that one of the best ways to reach these people was through social media and web based communication, but not directly selling their product. Instead they raised exposure through content that their customer is interested in. So they produced a series of content rich, information videos covering areas that their customers would be interested in, but which featured their freezer products. In their case it was a series of cookery demonstration videos that utilized their products.
This indirect way of promoting products is nothing new but something that businesses often don’t consider as much as they might when looking at ways to reach potential customers.
This represents a valuable social media strategy that many medium sized businesses could benefit from; using a professional video company to help them to conceptualize, script and produce a series of informative videos that are in an area of interest to their customer; educating, entertaining or demonstrating skills of use. Try it and see how many more customers engage with your brand as a result.
With Ebac, they found that people didn’t type into a search engine for ‘chest freezers’ but they did search for recipes and cooking tips, and so by producing a series of cookery demonstration videos they were able to reach their target customer indirectly and have maximum brand exposure.
Of course one of the benefits of doing this in a well planned and structured manner means that you will end up with a large amount of content to share online; through social media channels, on your website and in newsletters, giving you a pre-prepared set of communication assets that can regularly be released and gaining you profile, exposure and ultimately customers.
If you are serious about this tactic though you need to consider working with a company who is experienced and able to advise on the best creative and practical ideas, taking into account your customer profile, objectives and budget.
Like with any promotional and marketing strategy, it is important to think about the long term and by engaging people in valuable content, you are ensuring that your brand has exposure and therefore when the customer needs your product or service they have your brand at the front of mind and are able to easily come to you for their requirement. And that is what good content marketing is about!
See Lord Dugby Jones visiting Ebac here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01xll46
See some of Ebacs content marketing videos here:
