Content remains the most important aspect of your digital marketing campaign. SEO relies on your content, and your marketing depends on SEO. This relationship requires your marketing strategy to be consistently evolving. The algorithms used by search engines to rank sites are updated every few years, and Google publishes extensive information about how you can tailor your SEO strategy to be highly ranked on their engine.
Finding new and creative ways to present your content so that you are offering valuable information for your customers to experience can be a challenge. We have complied 10 content promotions examples we think can help digital marketers think creatively about content marketing.
Impactful imagery
Consumers have made it clear that they prefer finding primary information through visual content, with about 60% of senior executives preferring video to read online text.
Creating engaging video content has become faster and easier in recent years with tools as standard on phones and many others free online.
However, your imagery should be carefully curated and relevant to your business. While Instagram is flooded with eye-catching and glossy images, TickToc has weighed down with video content that attracts hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. Your content should be a reflection of your brand. Trying to imitate or otherwise mimic other brands’ content will not attract the attention of your audience, so you need to find a way to show your brand that will connect with your audience that is not tired.
Video content that shows how to use your product or service, or how it has changed the experience of a customer, is valuable to your audience. Interviews, tours and behind-the-scenes content connects with customers without ‘selling.’ Having influencers and other known people represent yo brand or discuss your product is also valuable for your audience if kept short. People don’t want long videos, about 2-3 minutes is long enough.
Blogs
Guest blogs are an invaluable way to increase your reach. Your brand is able to integrate into new markets easily when a respected voice can be heard speaking for your brand. Your guest blogger can drive conversions if they are well-known or liked personalities, and especially if they are an expert in your industry.
Guest bloggers can help traffic divert to your website, diversify your audience, and secure loyalty. Fans will often gravitate towards a personality over any actual value a product might provide. However, this does not mean that you should use a personality over an expert. Select your guest carefully and be sure that they provide value, not just passing traffic.
Resources
Being a primary source provider can change your standing in the industry. Being a generous industry leader that shares tips, tricks, knowledge, data, and resources places you in a valuable position in searches.
Once you become known as a ‘go-to’ primary resource within your industry, you become the ‘word’ that people search for. You might not become a verb, like Google, but you might become the first thing that pops to mind when a customer enters a search for ‘discount brand clothing’ (Zelanda) or cryptocurrency (Bitcoin). The reason brands become this popular is as simple as their generosity with resources that their customers value.
Influencers
Collaborating with influencers can give you expanded brand awareness in markets that you might not have considered. If you can combine your marketing message with a movement or cause, you can elevate your brand. This action does not have to be disingenuous. You really can promote a cause that your brand is committed to without using it as a tool for simply marketing; it can be a way to elevate awareness.
Some companies have donated time, money, and resources to aid people in and fleeing Ukraine. The collaboration with influencers who are speaking publicly about the need for relief funding for refugees as well as people who are living in Ukraine under the shadow of war benefits everyone. The influencer is recognized as backing a cause that many people find compelling and urgently important. Brands are seen to be aligned with causes that people care about, and this improves the public perception of the company. And the actual people who receive funding and support from the publicity that raises funds obviously receive a direct benefit. When protocols are followed, and transparency is the focus of working with influencers for care campaigns, every person in the chain can benefit without exploitation.
Variety
Your content needs to be appealing not only to your core audience but to those who are on the periphery as well. That requires your content marketing to be creative. Your blogs, images, video, and social media should cast a wide net that covers topics that are less mainstream than your focus content. You do not need too many pieces that stray from the core message, but a few deeply researched pieces that cover topics other companies in your industry might neglect. To find those topics, check message boards, like Quora or Reddit, for questions that pertain to your industry, but that there are few or no blogs addressing. You will likely find that these are controversial topics, so ensuring that you have done extensive research and provided your source information will help you to be seen as an established and trusted source on the topic.
Challenges
Many brands use promotional content to drive up brand awareness and conversions. Combining messaging and participatory content has been an effective way for brands to connect.
Using global issues, such as sustainability, can be made more fun and engaging for audiences when they are given a challenge that asks them to connect with a subject and post their results on social media. You request that people use a hashtag with their posts to promote your cause and your brand. For example, to promote fundraising for cancer, the ice-bucket challenge in 2014 was one of the first viral challenge campaigns that truly had a worldwide appeal. People dumped a bucket of ice-cold water over their heads after having raised money to do so. That money was donated to the cause, and people tagged their video content with a selection of 5 friends asked to also do the challenge.
Personalizing
Personalization is not a marketing fad. It forms the very basis of brands that actually connect with customers, even if the actual product is of poor quality, considered non-essential, or even damaging to a person’s health. One of the world’s biggest brands knew this when they launched their ‘share a coke’ campaign in the mid-2000s. By placing names on the bottles, people felt connected with a product that is well-known to be harmful to a person’s health due to its high sugar content. People who would not normally purchase the product would buy a can or bottle because it had their name on the side. Even people whose names were not popular and didn’t meet with the marketing demographic were ‘catered’ for with a generic term, like ‘superstar’, which encouraged shoppers to buy a can for those unfortunate enough not to have 1 of the 150 names selected for the 2011 campaign in Australia.
The ‘sharing’ campaign caught on worldwide, and despite the years of health warnings against the consumption of products high in sugars, the marketing was successful in elevating US sales in 2014. The company achieved a 2% increase in soft-drink sales, increasing Coke consumption from 1.7 to 1.9 billion servings per day, and making #shareacoke a trending topic on social media internationally.
Educating
One of the best ways to engage your audience is to offer them an education. President is set by software such as Photoshop, which provides in-depth videos and tutorials free for personal use. This content is high quality, engaging, and can be viewed multiple times without the user having to pay. This free content not only educates people on how to use their product but also creates loyalty. Such programs take a time investment to learn how to use, and by making it free, people can upskill at their leisure, and will then be inclined to purchase the software when they feel confident using it.
The strategy is simple – get people to use your product and develop their confidence and loyalty to your product. If a user finds value, they will select the payment option to use the product at higher levels. If they don’t you still have data and their good word-of-mouth to carry your brand. Word-of-mouth is the most valuable marketing you can hope for, but the best way to ‘buy’ it is through education and providing real value that customers want to share with others.
Virtual Shopping
Virtual shopping has become one of the most popular apps thanks largely in part to its arrival on big brand sites during the pandemic. Most countries had lockdowns, meaning that many people turned to online shopping.
Make-up brands are one of the biggest users of VR technology for virtual shopping experiences. Customers are able to test colors before purchase simply by uploading a photo of themselves using the app, then selecting the products they want to try. The process is meant to be novel and fun. It helps to drive sales for products that traditionally require a test prior to purchase.
Story Telling
Stories evoke emotion and engage audiences. Blogs, vlogs, and social media stories have captured people’s attention because we are so drawn to good storytelling.
All content marketing revolves around good storytelling. Each piece needs to be crafted with purpose, each campaign needs to be a full story with an arch, a message, and a drive towards a central plot. Your marketing team needs to know what your overall brand message is, and find stories in that message. This is the constant of all major brands that have survived for decades – a deep knowledge of the brand message and values; a desirable product; a story that continues to resonate.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post.
We would just like to remind you that all posts are the opinion of the writer only. We don’t take payment to write articles or reviews and we do not offer advertising or advertorial space on our blog. Everything expressed in our blogs is simply an opinion.
