Partner Article

Three sure signs your website is history

For images, sources, video links and external links see www.annwinter.com

1. Does your marketing push your message or pull in actively engaged prospects?

Progressive brands are reallocating their marketing budgets towards highly cost-efficient content marketing, with 60% of US businesses planning to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months. Forward-thinking companies are experimenting with creative content and taking more risks, but at a far lower cost and much greater potential return than traditional marketing packages.

The Coca-Cola Company mark the difference as follows: a 30-second TV ad pushes a message at a consumer which can go nowhere: it ‘solidifies content’, whereas excellent content marketing creates ideas ‘so contagious, they cannot be controlled’. It mainlines into people’s social sharing networks, activating prospects previously immune to the company’s traditional marketing methods.

2. Your content, your business drivers?

You want to double your sales, but reduce costs. Your product is popular, but how can content marketing leverage your customers’ existing social sharing habits to spread the demand?

Call it connectivity, call it consumer empowerment, thought leadership is ‘the hottest trend in media business’, according to Lewis D’Vorkin, CPO at Forbes Media.

Your customers can get information from anywhere to influence their buying decisions, but great content marketing ensures this info comes primarily from you. Whether your content wins them over with humour, entertainment, eye-catching visual thinking, or inspirational ideas, why not make it your message they want to spread?

3. Where’s the story?

Community, shared interests and a deeper experience are now seen as deeply intrinsic to a brand, rather than external to it.What we want to buy hasn’t changed, but how we buy it has. We still seek product efficacy, utility, community and even status with our purchases, but new technologies and social sharing have swollen the latter two beyond all proportion and shifted their focus.

That’s why visionary brands are using content marketing to exploit digital media and social sharing. They are becoming ‘original-content publishers’, a title normally reserved for the press and traditional publishing industry.

Strong brand stories are essential to this strategy, building an emotive narrative that consumers and prospects can engage and identify with, such as Ford’s Ford Mustang Facebook timeline, or The Bentley Brand Story video.

What’s your story?

Like both these companies with their long histories of success and cultural reference, The Coca-Cola Company claims that consumer-generated stories far outnumber their in-house ones on all their brands.You may not have their long-standing pedigree, but you won’t lack for stories, whether from clients, employees, or your own company history. Your products and services are as much part of our cultural landscape as Ford’s, Bentley’s and The Coca-Cola Company’s. Get in touch to discuss how we can shape this into a powerful brand story, and turn your prospects into active conversions and marketers!

See www.annwinter.com/home/three-ways-to-tell-if-your-website-is-history for video links, images, sources and external links.

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This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ann Winter .