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Why should banks invest in content marketing?

Content marketing for banks

Open Forum is my favorite example that I often give to my customers when I try to explain to them how continuously publishing helpful content can get them a loyal following.

Open Forum is the business help publication from American Express. They regularly publish high-quality information to help small and medium-sized businesses.

In fact, when I recently visited their website, I saw that their tagline is: “Insights, Inspiration and Connections to Help You Get Business Done”.

This information in the form of articles and blog posts isn’t necessarily about banking. In fact, most of the information is about how to improve your professional life, how to do your business well, and sometimes, even life hacks.

For example, recently they published this: 3 Qualities That Can Make or Break High-Performance Teams

The point is, creating positivity and encouraging productivity and through this, building a loyal readership that repeatedly visits the website and gets exposed to the American Express brand.

This Forbes article talks about why, to target young millenniums, it is very important that banks invest in good quality content marketing.

The article lists many reasons – the millenniums spend most of their time on their mobile phones, etc. – the most important reason is being visible in the times when content in all forms has exploded.

Every social networking platform or companies these days wants you to post some form of updates, whether they are images, videos or text. Just post, post and post.

We have become a civilization of content consumers and content publishers. People these days purchase good camera phones, even expensive camera phones, just so that they can publish good-looking photographs and videos on Instagram.

So, with so much content going on, you cannot ignore it.

But, posting random content doesn’t help your brand, especially when you are a bank. Personal content may help or may not help, depending on how strongly that personal brand is built. What do you do?

Content marketing for banks – educate your customers and clients

Educate your customers and clients.

I know, this sounds clichéd, but sharing knowledge and wisdom is a powerful tool.

Take for example the above Open Forum content platform by American Express. Very rarely they promote their banking services, though, you may say that they don’t need to promote their banking services because the brand is quite well-known.

They have built an audience. A loyal audience. Entrepreneurs and businesses can use the insights regularly published on the content platform to grow business and improve themselves.

This generates goodwill. Normally, such useful content isn’t available for free. These are very high-quality blog posts and articles.

Sooner or later, entrepreneurs and businesses have to use financial services. When the right time comes, why go to someone else? You already have a brand you like. You feel like you owe to that brand because you have used its content to improve your business.

In fact, Morgan Stanley also publishes something similar like Open Forum. They call it Ideas.

In the banking sector, even if you don’t want to follow the exact American Express template for content marketing, there is lots of scope for publishing helpful content.

Help for various banking services isn’t easily available. Some helpful blog posts and articles are written by users, but from the banks, very little information is published.

Banks can publish articles on how people can productively use their services for the benefit of their personal lives, professional lives and businesses.

So many people get into credit card troubles. Why can’t a bank start a video series advising people how to productively use credit cards rather than ruining themselves with uncontrollable shopping binges?

Banks have massive amounts of interesting data. They can easily use interactive videos or even infographics with amazing amounts of information on various banking services.

How to grow your small business with content marketing

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Grow your business with content marketing

How do you plan to promote your small business (I’m assuming you have a website and you need to promote it)?

Google AdWords?

Pay an SEO company to improve your search engine rankings?

Spend hours on social media posting random messages and replying to people?

All these activities are important and I’m not going to discourage you from using a judicious mix of them to promote your small business.

The problem (here we go!) with these activities is that they’re becoming less and less effective.

Conventional advertising has become boring

If you can use AdWords, so can your competitors. If you outbid them, they can outbid you.

And anyway, people on search engines pay less attention to paid links when they’re searching for useful information. The nature of paid links is that people don’t expect these links to contain helpful information.

Even if people do click your paid links, you can easily imagine how much you will end up spending on just a single campaign – businesses run multiple campaigns to cover multiple search terms.

Advertising has been exploited so much that people no longer trust it. In fact, they are constantly looking for ways to skip advertising. Many users have add-ons in their browsers to block advertisements. This is because most of the advertising is always about selling, selling, and selling. People get put off.

Read: Want to know how content marketing is better than advertising?

More than 650 million devices use some form of ad blocking.

Increasing number of people are using ad blockers

The problem with SEO is multi-faceted. Much of SEO these days has to do with good quality content and if you don’t recognize this and want to improve your SEO without investing in high-quality content, you will just spend money and effort without any results. There is no SEO these days without content marketing. You can acknowledge this today, or after a few months, after spending a ton of money and effort.

Moreover, without quality content, SEO is very easy. You can create “optimized” content in great quantity and go on publishing it. Since, low quality content is very cheap, you can use brute force to improve your SEO and sometimes, it actually works (it depends on how much effort your competition is putting).

Read: How content marketing actually improves your SEO

Since it is very easy, and also egotistically gratifying, many people do it. If you can get cheap content, so can your competitors.

Social media is full of noise. Timelines move very fast. There, unless you are paying to highlight your updates, most of your followers are going to miss your messages. You will be constantly catching up.

Since you will be spending most of your effort (and even money) maintaining a presence on social media, you won’t have any intellectual wealth to show for yourself.

Content marketing is the answer.

Here is a nice infographic of how you can use content marketing for making every part of your sales funnel effective.

Using content marketing to make every part of your sales funnel effective

Source

Why content marketing is the answer to all your small business growth troubles as far as promotion goes?

First, let us understand what content marketing actually means.

I won’t go into esoteric definitions of content marketing as many blogs have it. I will use very simple language to explain what content marketing to you is, and how you can use content marketing to grow your business.

Isn’t this the ultimate goal, growing your business?

So, what is content marketing? Especially in the context of a small business like yours?

Everything that you publish online is content.

All your web pages on your small business website, are content.

The images accompanying those web pages are content.

The publicly accessible PDFs that you have, are content.

If you are publishing blog posts, they are content.

If you constantly publish FAQs and answers to questions from your customers and clients, they are content.

When you send out an email campaign, that’s content.

When you post updates on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you are publishing content.

So, whatever you publish online for the consumption of people, you are publishing content and in a crude manner, you are also indulging in content marketing. You just don’t know it.

Content marketing means using a strategy to regularly publish content in such a manner that people not only want to get more of your content, they go out of their way to make sure that they don’t miss your content.

Remember that the ultimate aim of content marketing (your content marketing) should be the growth of your small business.

So, when you publish content, when you attract people to your content, they should be your prospective customers and clients, and not all-and-sundry.

If you try to attract all-and-sundry, you will simply waste money and time, which you don’t want.

In the context of your small business, content marketing means publishing useful content using your preferred channel, on an ongoing basis, so that your business name or your brand becomes familiar to people, and since you are publishing useful content, your target audience is not annoyed.

Not being familiar with you is one of the biggest reasons why people on the Internet don’t want to do business with you.

In bulleted form, your small business content marketing would include:

Publishing high-quality content regularly.
Providing answers to people’s problems and questions.
Highlighting the benefits of your product or service from different angles, in different ways.
Promoting your content using multiple channels like your blog and social media platforms.
Using analytics to note down what sort of traffic your content is attracting.
Tweaking and adjusting your new as well as existing content according to the feedback that you got from your analytics tools.

Things you need to know in advance if you want to grow your small business with content marketing

Content marketing is way more effective than the other promotional methods listed and not listed above, but don’t opt for content marketing as a tool for your small business growth thinking that it is cheap.

The key is “content marketing is more effective”.

Sure, you can go for cheap content and then like a hamster you can go on running inside a spinning wheel thinking that you’re doing something very important.

Hamster-like conditions with cheap content

Image credit

Your choice.

I’m not saying that you’re not going to succeed with content marketing unless you go bankrupt. I just mean to say that just like any other advertising and marketing cost, or any other business-related cost, content marketing is going to cost you.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that content marketing doesn’t stop at a few blog posts and articles. It is an ongoing process. You can take it as an operational cost.

This is because just like you are using content marketing, so are many more businesses.

You may say that the same thing happens with conventional advertising and SEO, again, I want you to pay attention to “content marketing is more effective”.

Just like SEO, you are constantly going to face competition for your small business in content marketing.

Just like advertising, you may have to spend money getting quality content for your website or blog or social media updates.

Yes, it comes with all the existing attributes like costing money, needing effort, and having to compete with the others.

What makes it different from other forms of marketing is, it is more effective, and if implemented properly, it will certainly help you grow your small business.

So, what makes content marketing so effective for growing your small business?

Don’t roll your eyes, but to benefit from content marketing, you must understand that you are providing something unique.

Unless you yourself recognize the potential of your business – your product or service – how are you going to convince the others? If you are half-hearted about your proposition, so will be the reaction to your proposition.

Once you become a big fan of your business, you have a lot to say.

Compare this with an interesting topic. How easy it is to have a conversation on a topic you find interesting.

Anyway, the biggest benefit of content marketing is that it gives you a unique identity.

A big problem with the Internet is – despite the fact that its potential for your small business is almost infinite – that there is too much noise. The noise doesn’t just come from your competitors. There are millions of distractions on the Internet.

How do you distinguish yourself?

How do people recognize you in the crowd?

Why should they do business with you if scores of other people are prompting them to do business with them?

You give them something to like about you. Something to respect you. Something to hold you in awe.

When they like you, when they respect you, when they hold you in awe, naturally they want to buy from you.

But how do you do that?

One way is to provide them exceptional service once they have bought something from you. But, this can only be done when they have become your customers or clients. What do you do when they haven’t yet become your customer or client?

You can offer them something free.

If it is something digital, although the cost might not be a problem, zillions of digital products on the Internet are free, so, again, people won’t be able to distinguish your small business from others. Heck, even Google provides free Gmail and a stack of other services free of cost. You will be just another service doing the same.

Giving physical products for free will be very expensive. Even giving services for free will be very expensive for a small business.

Providing helpful, good quality content, on the other hand, isn’t very expensive, and people don’t take good quality content for granted because there is so much lousy content available.

What do I mean by good content?

The definition of “goodness” changes from context to context. Some people may find amusing content good – for example creating and distributing funny GIFs. Some people may find fashion tips good. Some people may find recipes good. Some people may find web design and SEO tips good. Some people may find Internet marketing tips good.

Visited boredpanda.com? As the name suggests, it’s a website for people who are bored. So the content over there that unbores them is good content for them.

“Good” here means something that is useful, something that entertains, something that is relevant, and something that is topical, and last but not the least, something that is written well that shows that you respect your readers.

We live in a screwed-up world but fortunately, people still appreciate help, and are grateful for it.

Suppose, you sell scented candles from your website. If you search for the phrase “buy scented candles online” on Google you will see that most of the listings are from famous online retailers. It will be very difficult to get your link featured with these mega-million retail stores. I’m not saying it is impossible, but it is difficult.

What do you do?

You first create a very unique line of scented candles, and then build a community around your business through content marketing.

You have to offer people something that is not available on all these retail shops.

Fine, even if you come up with something very unique, how do you promote your small business with very limited budget?

Through content marketing.

Start posting high-quality pictures of your scented candles on Facebook and Instagram. Invite people to share their experiences of using scented candles from various sources.

Create a video of how you typically create scented candles.

Write blog posts on the process of making scented candles.

Find references of scented candles in classical books and create a blog post on this theme.

Send regular email updates to people on how they can use scented candles for different occasions.

Educate people about the therapeutic benefits of scented candles.

Once you start using content marketing to promote your small business of scented candles, you will keep on coming up with different ideas.

But, no matter how appreciative and grateful we are, we easily forget. We need to be reminded regularly. So, good quality content needs to be published regularly.

For that, create a content publishing and content marketing calendar for your small business.

Remember that there is a reason why it is not called “content publishing” but “content marketing”.

It takes strategy to use content to market your small business.

Once you have released your content into the World Wide Web, you need to make sure that the right people get access to that content. No matter how great your content is, unless your target audience is able to find it, it is not going to achieve the desired results.

Use all the available channels to promote your content. Promote your blog on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Build a mailing list and broadcast your links whenever you publish them. Encourage people to subscribe to your mailing list.

Here are some nice statistics published in an infographic on Demand Metric:

70% people prefer to learn about a company or a product through articles and blog posts rather than an advertisement.
82% customers and clients have a positive outlook about a company after reading content from the company.
On an average, marketers are spending over 25% of their marketing budget on content marketing.
91% B2B marketers use content marketing.
86% B2C marketers use content marketing.
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing.
Per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately three times as many leads as traditional marketing.
86% people skip TV advertisements when given the means.
90% consumers find custom and informative content useful.

What makes content marketing cheaper and more effective compared to traditional marketing, especially for small business?

Social sharing. Search engine traffic. Direct referrals.

For every non-content marketing promotion, you pay for every benefit that you derive.

When you advertise on Google AdWords, you pay for every click. If you’re paying one dollar per click and if you get 200 clicks in a day, you are spending $ 200 per day for those 200 clicks.

But when you publish high-quality content after adopting content marketing, if your content is good and valuable, people promote that content on their own. You don’t have to pay them to promote your content. It is so valuable that people want to share it with their colleagues, friends and relatives.

The quality of your content, coupled with social sharing, improves your search engine rankings. Whether you get 200 clicks from Google or 2 million clicks, you don’t have to pay even a single cent to Google (or any other search engine). After your initial investment in getting high quality content, the cascading effect is totally free.

The benefits of content marketing for your small business

As you do content marketing for your small business, just in a couple of months you will begin to see the following positive changes:

Improved search engine rankings (of course, better search engine rankings are needed)
More targeted traffic to your website
Increased referral traffic to your small business website, because more websites and blogs will be linking to you and more people will be sharing your links on their social media profiles
People pay more attention to what you have to say
More leads are generated from your website and other sources
Your sales increase

Conclusion

Although, as a small business, you may want to try out many marketing methods, content marketing for small business is not only cost-effective but also result-oriented.

With little creativity, you can gain a competitive edge over businesses that are not using content marketing to promote themselves, or who are using content marketing wrongly.

You can place yourself as an expert or an authority figure if intellectual branding matters in your field. When people respect you for your wisdom, it’s easier for them to do business with you because they trust your intelligence.

You also become familiar to people. When you continuously publish content, people become used to your presence, and not in a negative sense. They associate you with high quality content and timely help.

The overall visibility of your small business increases with consistent and strategic content marketing. More people link to your website. More people share your links. Search engines begin to rank you higher.

Clarity of purpose is very important if you want to promote your small business with content marketing. The entire strength of content marketing lies in strategy and execution. You must know what you want to publish, why you want to publish and what should be the end result. Once you have figured that out, there should be nothing holding you back.

How to get past ad blockers with effective content marketing

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Getting past ad blockers with effective content marketing

Why do you think content marketing became such a hit on the Internet?

It’s always been around.

One way or the other businesses have always used content to build broadcasting platforms and then use these platforms to promote their products and services.

Take for instance niche magazines and tabloids. The sorts published by the food industry, the travel industry, even school magazines. Or religious publications. These are all age-old examples of content marketing. Build an audience, and once you have built an audience, use the platform to pitch your offer.

Not just niche publications. Even general, current affairs magazines and newspapers are examples of blogs. Many bloggers make money by showing ads on their blogs once they have built an audience. The same happens with conventional publications. They keep on publishing content and once many people begin to subscribe to them, they use these publications to sell ads, and even ideologies.

So, what is different on the web? Why is it becoming increasingly difficult to use ads to promote your business?

People use ad blockers.

Initially you had to use browser extensions and plug-ins to be able to block ads on web pages. These days the browsers come with native ad blockers.

Firefox has a native ad blocker. Safari has one. Even Google is reluctantly incorporating an ad blocker but since most of its revenue depends on publishing ads on the Google search engine, it doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind. But even if the Chrome browser doesn’t give you native ad blocking features, you can easily get numerous ad blocking extensions.

On the Internet, the problem isn’t just ad blocking. It’s very easy to commit frauds on the Internet because what sort of ads you pass on to your audience can be manipulated any time. This causes financial loss not just to the target audience, but even companies like Google that manage ads.

When you access ads, or rather, when you are exposed to ads in the conventional publishing media, your privacy isn’t being violated, which is the case, a norm, on the Internet.

Although you cannot avoid seeing those ads because they are intermingled with the content that you want to consume, there is no mechanism to track what sort of ads you watch more and how much time you spend reading what in a magazine or a newspaper.

This is a big reason why people have started using ad blockers – they are concerned about their privacy.

Anyway, whatever is the reason, on the Internet people don’t like coming across ads and if they can, they try to block them.

So, if they are so averse to seeing ads, how do you promote your business? How do you let them know that you have something valuable to offer?

Through effective content marketing.

Using effective content marketing to get past ad blockers

Although I have no grudge to grind against conventional advertising, content marketing is more effective, and also, more economical.

Technology these days makes advertising quite precise. Take for example Facebook; the data accuracy that Facebook owns is unprecedented. They know practically everything about you.

Google goes a step further. It doesn’t just know everything about you through its interface, if you keep yourself logged into your Google account, whatever you do on the web, whichever website you visit, whichever video you watch, whatsoever comment you leave, everything is being quietly noted by Google and then it is being passed on to advertisers to enable them to target their ads accordingly. There is nothing wrong in that as long as all this is done ethically and with your knowledge.

Advertising is transient. You have to be constantly in front of your audience to remind them of your business. This makes it very costly.

Suppose you advertise using the Google AdWords program. If you have used it, you know that you have to pay for every click that Google sends your way. This sort of PPC program is offered by every platform including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

These ads may work for businesses with big advertising and marketing budgets because they can afford to show you ads over a long period of time. Even if you don’t click those ads, even if you don’t do business with them through those ads, they don’t mind spending money just for brand visibility.

But, for a small business, commercial advertising and marketing can prove to be very expensive even if you forget about ad blocking, rampant among browsers these days.

A better alternative is content marketing. Once your proverbial wheel starts rolling, it pretty much powers itself.

Whereas in conventional advertising, the more you advertise, the more you pay, in content marketing, it depends on your strategy and innovation.

More content marketing doesn’t always mean more spend. In fact, the more effective your content marketing is, the less you have to spend on it.

Why content marketing is more effective than ads is because it builds relationships instead of simply urging people to do business with you.

Why should they do business with you if there is no connection? Why should they trust you? Why should they suddenly spend money on your product or service when there are so many other options available to them? What is so special about your business?

They won’t have such quandaries if you constantly provide value to them through your quality content. When they are constantly exposed to your quality content, they begin to trust you. They know that you know your stuff and you can be trusted with their business. They don’t mind spending their money on your product or service.

What sort of content marketing helps you get past ad blockers?

When you provide valuable content to your prospective customers and clients, they want to keep in touch on their own.

Whether you make them laugh, whether you entertain them or whether you give them useful information that they can use to grow their business or enrich their personal lives, they wouldn’t like to miss out on good stuff.

They make sure that they subscribe to your updates (if you publish a daily or weekly newsletter). They follow you on social media and social networking platforms. They engage with you.

Since, you are always interacting with them, sharing with them your thoughts on your business, you are constantly reminding them, without being intrusive or obstructive, what business you are in and what sort of help you can provide in case that help is needed.

You become a pleasant part of their daily lives. They look forward to hearing from you or getting your update or coming across your content somewhere. You are not one of those shady marketers constantly trying to sell them something or hoodwink them into buying something they don’t need.

Through content marketing you keep them informed. You update them regularly.

For example, if you sell an app, instead of constantly urging them to buy the app or subscribe to it, you tell them how they can use the app to improve their work. You share with them stories about people who have benefited from your app. You talk about the various problems that your app solves. You share tips with them to maximize their benefit in case they decide to use your app.

Effective content marketing improves your SEO

Another benefit of effectively using content marketing is, due to its nature, it organically improves your search engine rankings.

What does a search engine like Google need? It needs quality content.

The more valuable content you publish, the more valuable content it gets to crawl, index and rank.

Since you are constantly writing on your topic, you are handling its various aspects, you are constantly covering all your keywords, or your search terms, and their various combinations. Your website or your blog becomes rich with information about your profession or your expertise. You become an information hub about your topic or your profession. This gives Google more content to index. This improves your organic SEO.

More people link to you because of your quality content. More people share your content on their social media and social networking profiles. More people react to your content. This further improves your organic SEO.

Since your rankings improve naturally, you don’t have to spend money on a program like Google AdWords.

Since anyway people are interacting with your content on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you don’t have to spend money on these platforms to highlight your content. This job is being done by your contacts, by your followers and by your friends.

Influencers in your industry or in related industries promote your content on their own.

Now that you don’t have to depend on advertising, due to content marketing, you don’t need to worry about getting past ad blockers anyway.

6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing

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Benefits of Content Marketing

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Although in the history of advertising, marketing and business promotion, you can find innumerable examples of entrepreneurs using content marketing to its utmost advantage, people are still sceptical about it.

And this is when, everything that exists on the web is content. According to this description of content marketing on Moz:

Every email, every tweet, every landing page, and every product description—they’re all examples of content, and one of the best ways of describing what they all have in common was summed up brilliantly by Ian Lurie, of Portent, Inc.:

Content isn’t ‘stuff we write to rank higher’ or ‘infographics’ or ‘long-form articles.’
Content is anything that communicates a message to the audience. Anything.
— Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent, Inc.

Also read What is Content Marketing? Explained in detail

One of the major reasons why people cannot make sense of content marketing is that its benefits are not immediate.

For example, if you get a website designed, after a couple of months, you will have an online presence and you will be able to see the various parts of your website. Whether you like it or not, the website will be there right in front of you. You will be able to look at it yourself, and you will be able to show it to whomever you feel like.

Beyond the basic content – the text and the images and the videos that you have on your website – the benefit of content marketing is not visible. You can either predict it or imagine it.

Content marketing benefits seem very far away

To an average businessperson, concepts like building an audience, providing good quality content and expanding presence on the web, seem like “big business”-talk and consequently, intimidating. But they are not.

Just like these concepts work at the macro level, they also work at the micro level.

Also, most of the content marketers cannot guarantee success, primarily because the clients are reluctant to invest enough money (within appropriate budget, content marketing success can be guaranteed).

Unless all the parties involved are on the same plain and totally understand what they are trying to achieve, it is very difficult to experience success in content marketing.

Fortunately, there are various organizations, evangelists and interest groups that are constantly endeavoring to educate business managers and decision makers about the power of content marketing.

Doing research on the same topic, I came across an interesting graphic. I didn’t want to use the graphic so I reproduced it by slightly altering it. The graphic below summarizes the 6 indisputable benefits of content marketing.

Benefits of Content Marketing

When we talk of the benefits, we assume that everything necessary to carry out a well-defined content strategy is being done.

Below I’m going to describe these individual content marketing benefits and will also tell you how you can derive these benefits for your own business no matter what size your business is.

Benefits of content marketing

1. Increased website traffic

Website traffic

90% of Credible Content clients hire us because they want to improve their search engine rankings, which means, they need more website traffic from search engines.

This is the most sure shot advantage of using high-quality content to create your presence on the web.

To rank your website or individual links, Google needs to access, crawl, index and rank your content. Without content, Google has got nothing to process.

How the strategic content marketing increase your website traffic from search engines and other sources?

Improving your search engine rankings has multipronged benefits. You begin to get more search engine traffic. More people are able to find your content.

When they find your content on search engines, they don’t necessarily do business with you. They may simply link to your content, which sends you direct traffic and also improves your SEO.

If it is interesting and useful, they may also share your content on their social media and social networking profiles, giving you a social presence.

Google takes your social presence into account when writing your content.

The marketing part means that you distribute your content through as many channels as possible.

Once you have published a blog post, for example, you share your link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. You may also republish it on Medium and LinkedIn.

You may also encourage other influencers in your industry to share your content.

This way, Google has multiple opportunities to come across your content. If somehow its crawlers are not crawling your website, they will be able to find and index your links from other sources, mostly from social media and social networking websites.

Google+ is Google’s own social networking platform so even if it doesn’t look for your content on other social networking websites, it is definitely going to find it on its own network.

2. Brand awareness

Brand awareness with content marketing

Again, branding isn’t just for big businesses.

If you come across some reference of Credible Content on another website or a blog or a social networking platform and immediately you know that it is an agency that provides quality content, it’s branding.

Read Statistically most B2B enterprises use content marketing for brand awareness

Whether you realize it or not, whether you admit it or not, an average customer or client has multiple choices these days. Your competitor’s website is just a click away, or a new Google search away.

Unless you give them a reason to remember you or recognize you, they’re going to forget about you. Persistent content marketing creates an awareness of your brand and people always remember what you stand for.

If you regularly publish a newsletter, say, one broadcast every week, when people recognize your newsletter, when they know and remember who has sent the newsletter and what the newsletter contains, that’s brand awareness.

3. Customer engagement

Content marketing for customer engagement

Why should people do business with you? Especially for the first time?

Why should they choose you over another business?

Through content marketing you can keep your customers engaged in conversations.

If you offer a solution, if you offer a suggestion, if you offer some sort of help, people are going to respond, in whatsoever manner. This is engagement.

Read 10 ways to write highly engaging content

You need to engage your prospective customers and clients positively. This way, the more you engage them in meaningful conversations, the more eager they are to do business with you.

How do you engage your customers with quality content?

I will cite the LongtailPro example.

A few days ago I purchased a LongtailPro subscription. Before I had purchased the subscription, I had used their trial version.

After using their trial version, I didn’t purchase the subscription for more than two years. But, to be able to use their trial version, I had given them their email ID and once in a while they used to send me some data about my website and also, how I can use LongtailPro, if I start my subscription, to improve my search engine rankings.

These were not just promotional messages. Their messages were constantly helping me.

After I purchased a subscription I still get tutorials on how to make the full use of their app. They have uploaded numerous YouTube videos and they keep prompting me to have a look at them to properly understand how to use the app.

I can also give you my own example. If you have been an old subscriber of my Credible Content updates, you may have noticed that I have started broadcasting my newsletter regularly after quite a while.

Ever since I started again, I have received 5 queries from my subscribers (it has just been two weeks or even less) and one among these 5 queries has turned into a paid assignment (Hello Francis!).

This way, content marketing helps you keep your audience engaged.

4. Leads and conversion

More leads and better conversion

This is quite simple. As your website traffic increases, as your brand becomes known, as you engage with your target audience, you naturally get more leads and these leads naturally convert more.

5. Your own broadcasting channel

Develop your own broadcasting channel

When you publish a blog regularly, when you send out your email newsletter regularly, you build an audience. People start paying attention to you.

Whenever you publish a blog post, you draw people from the search engines. If you post your updates on social media and social networking websites, people either respond to you on their own timelines, or they visit your blog. They become a part of your audience.

Since you are constantly posting quality content on your social networking profiles and people are constantly engaging with your content and interacting with you, your friends and followers go on increasing.

Since more people land on your blog, more people subscribe to your updates and hence, you grow your mailing list, and when you grow your mailing list, you grow your email newsletter audience.

These are all your broadcasting channels.

You can use these channels whenever you launch a new product or a new service or you launch an update or you add a new feature to your product or your service.

Since you have got an audience that pays attention to you, whenever you need to broadcast the message, you will be able to do so.

This brings to my mind an incident that one of my clients had with one of his customers. The customer left a very bad review on Yelp, despite it being her own fault.

My client used his blog and his newsletter to explain his point of view and a lot of his visitors and subscribers took a personal initiative and left positive responses on Yelp.

You can use content marketing to build such a broadcasting channel for yourself.

6. Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage

Although many of your competitors might already be using content marketing, there might be many who are not. If you pursue strategic content marketing, you will not just have a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content to promote their businesses, you will also have competitive advantage over those competitors who are.

Content marketing sort of, democratises marketing. It’s all about innovation, ingenuity and initiative. If you use these three traits with sincerity, you can compete with IBM despite being a small IT firm (that is, if you want to).

A good thing about content marketing is, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality and uniqueness. Okay, sometimes quantity does triumph over quality, but in most of the cases it does not.

Joe Pulizzi’s book, Epic Content cites a nice example. There is a River Pools and Spas company that installs fiberglass swimming pools in the Virginia and Maryland areas. In 2009 they were in deep trouble. Some sort of recession was going on and people were requesting their deposits back. The company was over drawing its checking account. the closure of the business seemed imminent.

When the CEO, Marcus Sheridan decided to use content marketing to promote his fiberglass swimming pools business, they were drawing approximately $4 million in annual revenues and spending $250,000 on marketing.

With two years of content marketing, they brought down their marketing cost to $40,000 per year, and by the end of 2011, they were selling more fibreglass pools than any other fibreglass pools installer in North America.

Marcus Sheridian’s content marketing was so successful that he started traveling the world lecturing other business owners on how to use content marketing.

You can read the Marcus Sheridian content marketing case study.

This is just one example. There are many.

Does content marketing just mean publishing a blog post?

Although blog publishing is a big part of content marketing, many small business owners confuse blogging with content marketing. The entire ecosystem of content marketing includes and involves

Understanding what type of content your target audience is looking for
Creating/writing high-quality content that informs, engages and if possible, entertains – on an ongoing basis
Analysing incoming website traffic to find out what sort of content is attracting people to your website
Making changes to creating/writing high-quality content according to your findings
Using the right content dissemination channels to distribute your content
Search engine optimizing your content so that it is easier to find it on search engines
Updating and repurposing existing content on an ongoing basis
Publishing a regular newsletter or email mailing list

So, basically, content marketing consists of continuously publishing valuable content and then making an all-out effort to make it easy for people to find it. Sometimes, you have to deliver the content where your audience is. For example, if your audience is on Facebook, then you have to post links to your content on Facebook. Similarly, on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Content marketing at the outset may seem like very hard work and this may undermine whatever notion of benefits you have in mind, but actually when you get down to implementing your content marketing strategy, to your pleasant surprise, you will find that it is not that difficult.

Besides, the benefits are so great, as you have seen in the case of Marcus Sheridan and his fibreglass swimming pools, that after a while, the effort and investment tend to move towards practically zero.

Why the Samsung India Service ad is a great storytelling example

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The Samsung India Service ad generated 150.3 million views, becoming the most watched ad on YouTube.

I got the update from this Marketing Land update and I’m not clear whether this was the most watched ad of November 2017 or the entire 2017 year. But that’s not the point of my this post.

First, watch the video…

//youtu.be/779KwjAYTeQ

The video shows a Samsung Service van driving through very rough terrains while the technician continuously reassures some “ma’am” that he is going to reach soon.

“Ma’am” needs a reassurance that he is going to reach before 7. He commits that he will. He and his van driver overcome multiple obstacles on a mountainous terrain.

She keeps calling and he keeps reassuring that he is going to reach on time.

Near to the climax we discover that “ma’am” is a young, visually impaired girl.

As soon as the technician realizes that, he has this wondering look, something like, why is she in a hurry to get her TV repaired, even when she cannot watch it?

The suspense keeps on building as he repairs the TV.

Finally, he is able to repair it and the young girl calls out to everybody in the house. Apparently it’s a hostel or a shelter for the blind. Young, smiling and laughing kids run into the TV room.

The girl asks for the TV remote, switches on the TV and there is this reality TV show, a singing competition, in which a blind girl is mellifluously singing a haunting Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan rendition.

It’s one of my favorites, so can’t resist putting it here for your pleasure…

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV7_YJf1BBw

The blind girl in the room very proudly tells the Samsung technician that the girl on TV is from there, and she is her best friend.

In content marketing we’re constantly talking about telling stories.

In this ad Samsung India, through a very touching story, tells how important giving such a service is, once people have invested in one of their products, and how seriously they take their customers.

They could have used the usual, run-of-the-mill advertising line showing a family in a metropolitan city having problems with their TV set and how Samsung Service quickly solves the problem.

Although this would have delivered the message, it wouldn’t have made the sort of impact that this ad makes.

How does the story make an impact?

People should relate to it
The storyline should be fluent and simple
The core message should be clearly delivered without overtly expressed (in terms of advertising and content marketing)
It should leave an imprint

Through this ad Samsung India Service successfully conveys that once you have purchased a Samsung appliance you are never on your own no matter where you are.

Through a single storyline the story manages to deliver the entire essence of Samsung India Service

They provide after sales service everywhere, so people should be able to buy Samsung appliances anywhere.
Their support staff and technicians are punctual.
They have launched a Samsung India Service van that can easily travel to remote locations.
The Samsung staff is committed and well-equipped.
Samsung Service is a part of your life story.

An emotional angle is added by showing that the place where the service van is going is full of blind kids and one of the inmates has made it to the national TV through her talent despite having no vision.

The story-line does not want to arouse a feeling of pity by showing a house full of blind kids who are very cheerful and full of jest and enthusiasm.

This spirit also rubs onto the technician from Samsung who is initially a bit puzzled by all the excitement and all the blind kids running around and later on, although subtly, he understands why the TV needed to be repaired urgently.

This, should be the essence of content marketing – tell meaningful stories that don’t just convey the business message that you want to convey, but also touch people deeply in a manner that they remember you and they want to associate with you.