We won’t be talking about content marketing today if it is not something that has been tested and trusted. A lot of companies have done it before you, a lot of business are currently in it, and there is still a very large chunk of the pie for you to take a bite from too.
Knowing that one of the best ways to learn is from the experience of others, I have come up with some content marketing lessons from some top companies.
1. Always seek improvement
These are three words you can hear almost everywhere, so why did I add them to the list? I did because it is important I hammer the point.
The President of Pixar – that beloved animation company that makes all those great cartoons we love – has revealed that they never start any production process with great ideas. Even though they have a team of excellent writers, they all start up with ‘ugly babies’ that are a mashup of a lot of ideas.
These ugly babies are worked with, fine-tuned and tailored for different audiences before the masterpiece comes out. That is to show you that having the best writer might not be the greatest thing anymore. Instead, having one who can take the base content and improve it for the target audience in time (since relevance is highly essential with content) is paramount.
2. Videos rule!
Especially when they are still live. According to a survey conducted by Facebook, the social media giant reported that videos would reach more organic traffic than images would by a margin of 135%. The call-to-action rate is even bettered.
With a video, the poster is 3 times more likely to get someone to watch their video when it is still live. Under the same conditions, they are likely to get 10 times more comments. An image is never live, so all those figures don’t apply.
If you have always been camera shy, this is the year you shed that skin and leave your cocoon.
3. Digital is the new cool
With content marketing, you have to always seek out new ways your audience have started to consume that content. The influx of digital technology over the past few years has started to create a shift in the way content is consumed. Rather than stay glued to a web page for long, users would now prefer to ‘listen’ to the content.
Enter solid artificial intelligence systems, of which we have both Siri and Alexa.
Apple and Amazon, respectively, have created software that would make the use of the internet better and even more seamless. People have taken advantage of that to start getting information from everywhere without having to look at anything. If I were you, I would start creating content for these digital doorways. Think of the wide audience you can reach with that.
Bonus: Transparency is Key
This is true forever business, and it is applicable to content marketing too. Back in 2015, Machinima paid a couple of YouTube influencers to make endorsements on the Xbox One and several other games.
They were able to get the game to go viral this way, but things did not end up well. The FTC found out that the endorsements were paid, and that could only mean deceit of the customers. Long story short, they found themselves on the bad side of the FTC.
Machinima is joined on the list of such scandals by Warner Bros and Instagram, but that is a story for another day. Today, you should always try to make all your content open and devoid of malicious intent.
Don’t forget to check out our golden rules of content marketing as we plan to round up on this topic this week.
