Member Article

Five Content Marketing Tips Older Than You

Trying to pin an age on an original idea is difficult because by and large, another person almost always thought of the idea before you did.

If you were to evaluate some of the most successful marketing campaigns right now and do a comparison to the successful campaigns of history, you’d find continuous similarities. The reason is, not surprisingly, that some stuff just works and there is a time-tested, effective technique to distribute it. But that’s not a bad thing, it signifies that there’s a vast library of successful campaigns that we can immitate and this is also true of content marketing. Content marketing is really an ancient craft that owes it’s success not to clever marketing gimmicks or 7 figure budgets but, instead, to earning emotional connections with the people it comes into contact with. It offers an idea or a story that the customer can relate with.The concept of telling stories to help share ideas is as old as time. For example, in a recent issue of Content Marketing World magazine, a fun infographic of a timeline was produced. On it, some 4200 years BC, was the ‘first noted example’ of some terrific idea-led content marketing. A cave was found that had a drawing on the walls. Linguists studied the paintings and came to the conclusion that, loosely translated, the cave painting illustrated ‘6 Ways a Spear Could Save You From a Wild Animal’. Whilst distinctly very different in nature from most of the campaigns we experience today, we are able to imagine why such valuable information, in such a simple to digest form, could have made the painter a minor celebrity in his day - especially if he was also a spear merchant.When you strip away the marketing speak and theory, what remains is actually a form of communicating with your audience and if ancient cave painters can do it effectively, you can too.Apply these five lessons from history to improve your content marketing strategies.**Lesson One: Don’t Be Afraid to Create Content that is Truly Unique (even if that means fake)**Did you know there was once actual ‘factual’ reports of evidence of life on the moon published by a highly regarded New York newspaper? Yes, in 1835, the New York Sun published a 6 part series about how Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the moon. The drawings that accompanied the series showed cherub like aliens, strange and wonderful foliage and curious mythical beings drinking from a waterhole. Of course, it was a complete work of fiction, but presented in a very skilled manner and in the end it actually led to a substantial growth in readers. Circulation continued to grow for two years after the series was published. Lesson Two: If You Have Something of True Value to Your Customers, Try Giving It Away for FreeWhilst there are many successful examples of this method throughout history, none are so clinically well-executed as the Jell-O free recipe book example. In 1904, Jell-O published it’s first free recipe book. The recipe book was created to help people who were hard-up on cash bake tasty meals on a budget. It was so well received that it actually contributed to over $1million of sales to Jell-O, without ever being used as a direct marketing or over the top promotional gimmick. It simply offered great recipes and people liked that. Lesson Three: Be Creative with the Distribution Channels for Your ContentCommunicating with your customers, wherever they are, is the biggest goal of a successful content marketing campaign. But its also important to understand that whilst you could reach your customers in a lot of different ways, they don’t want to be bombarded by marketing messages everywhere they go. Instead of interrupting your audience with a marketing communication, just have an engaging interaction with them - and that could be something that has nothing to do with your product or service. Engage in a dialogue with your audience that brings them some emotional reward, and you’re on your way to cracking things.People talk about things they like. It’s that simple. They also talk about things they don’t like but perhaps that’s an idea for the next article in this series? For example, in the 1980s, several toy manufacturers created extensive content marketing campaigns that relied heavily on cartoons and comic books. Hasbro’s GI Joe is one such toy because in 1960, when it was first released, it didn’t achieve good sales figures. In the 1980’s when they were relaunched in conjunction with an animated TV series, cartoons and interesting character histories, sales soared. Hasbro didn’t push out marketing messages, they just created great content. They did the same thing to similar success a couple of years later for Transformers. Lesson Four: Be FutureproofWhen you’re coming up with your next content marketing plan, think about how it will look a year from now. There are some examples of content marketing that were created before you were born that are just as relevant and enjoyable now as they were the day they were made. To pick a more recent example, you might remember John Cleese and the Institute of Backup Trauma? This was a video campaign created by LiveVault (long before there was a YouTube), to promote a new data backup product they were launching. The link to the 6 minute long video was reportedly sent to 150,000 IT managers via email and within 2 months had generated 250,000 downloads. A year later and the video was still being downloaded up to 10,000 times a week. Now, 8 years later, the video has been migrated onto YouTube and has been uploaded hundreds of times and is viewable on mobiles and tablets just as well as it was viewed on PC. Make your content last. Lesson Five: Have a Solid PlanI’m going to jump back into a present-day example here to reinforce the importance of strategically planning content campaigns. I’m not normally one to spend too much time planning but when the world’s largest brand takes time-out to do some, it’s worth the rest of us stopping to take notice. In May 2012, Coca-Cola announced a major shift in the core marketing communication objective. In the past, they had always strived for ‘creative excellence’ in the marketing efforts, but as part of their Content Vision for 2020, they want to shift this focus to ‘content excellence’. If you search for this online, there are some excellent videos from the company themselves about how they plan to achieve this and why, and, most importantly, how from 2020, ’every contact point with a customer should tell an emotional story…’Take the time to watch these videos and if you take nothing else from them, take at least the knowledge that if content marketing is that important to the biggest brands in the world, then it sure as heck needs to be important to you, too.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Content Demon .