The push and pull of active content marketing
Content marketers are relying too much on consumers to seek out their content. In their attempt to avoid ‘advertising’ in the traditional sense, brands have left out the ‘push’ factor from their content marketing campaigns. Relying too heavily on ‘pull’ tactics simply does not offer the same guarantees as can be achieved from actively promoting content. Of course, content must be relevant and of a high enough quality to attract users, but brands can’t bypass the importance of promoting their content to consumers who may not stumble upon it via search engine results or social media shares.
Many brands are spending a great deal of money on content creation, but are not actively distributing the content. Recent changes to Google algorithms and the nature of search means that brands can’t just rely on their search engine optimisation skills to attract consumers’ attention. Moreover, “pull” focused content marketers are depending upon active consumers discovering their content. If marketers do not remain active promoters of their content, they’ll find it hard to reach audiences beyond already loyal consumers and established followers of their brand’s social media profiles.
Successful content marketing strategies balance their use of push and pull tactics for marketing success. Given that around 95 per cent of B2B and 97 per cent of B2C companies in the UK are practising some form of content marketing, there’s a lot of competition for consumers’ attention. Hence it pays for brands to take a more active approach to getting their content in front of their target users to generate a strong return on their investment in branded content development.
Subtle Promotion
Good content marketers want to avoid overwhelming consumers with overtly promotional tactics. But they don’t want to underwhelm them either. According to research by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA), companies care most about raising brand awareness from their content marketing programmes. To achieve this goal, marketers must create content that will pull consumers into the brand’s content environment. But to achieve this they must first get their content noticed. That means they must also ‘push’ the content into online environments where consumers can discover it. Brands must go beyond simply promoting their content with a few tweets, a post on the company blog or a website update. This is especially true if the amount of the company’s social media followers does not match that of the branded content’s intended audience. Brands must consider far more active ways to reach out to their consumers, ideally finding platforms that can offer much greater scale than that which a brand can achieve from its own platforms, such as digital media titles with large audiences of relevant consumers.
However, the active “push” tactics brands deploy must be consistent with the content marketing strategy. For example, consumers do not want flashy or intrusive ads that interrupt their online activity. Consumers’ priority when they are online is content consumption, so any ad units that promote access to branded content must sit natively within the site that hosts them. Moreover, these native ad formats must be placed within relevant third-party editorial to ensure that when consumers engage with the ad units, the branded content they visit is seen as part of each user’s browsing experience.
Analyse and Adapt
Many brands assume their content marketing campaign must be fuelled by a constant stream of new, high-quality, original content — whether articles, videos, images, games or competitions. Some brands focus on the volume of original content creation to the detriment of content quality. However, creating good quality original content costs both time and money. Many marketers overlook the ways they can repurpose existing content to keep it relevant and fresh, thus optimising the return on investment from each item of content. With a little creativity, the life span of content can be extended by simply re-using or re-editing content — or even simply promoting content to a different audience. Key to this re-use tactic is the frequency that the re-used or re-edited content is promoted to specific audiences. The content will quickly lose its appeal if its promoted too frequently. However, consumers aren’t as averse to re-visiting content they’ve seen before as some marketers might think. Entertaining YouTube videos are frequently watched more than once by the same consumers. Slight re-edits of social media videos and other items of branded content can also help the content to appear to be original, when in fact it is being re-used.
To assess which types of content should be re-used, marketers must collect and analyse comprehensive metrics of consumer interaction with branded content. Doing so identifies the types of content that are impacting consumers the most. It also helps marketers to ensure that future original content fits this form. This insight enables content development teams to tweak their creativity towards what consumers want to see and actively engage with. If marketers don’t have a comprehensive analytics package for branded content, they should partner with a good content discovery platform which, at the very least, measures duration of interaction, viral activity, and the sources and volume of traffic to the brand’s content.
Content Placement Must Match Consumption Habits
To communicate effectively with consumers, marketers have to place their branded content around the Internet in a way which reflects the multiple methods digital content is consumed. That means content marketing strategies must be responsive to the diverse content consumption habits of target audiences.
Some consumers actively search for a brand’s content or come across it via social media channels. However, “surfing the ‘net’” is still alive and well. Many consumers still move from one piece of content to the next through hyperlinks on pages of editorial. Marketers that are able to place headlines and images hyperlinked to branded content within relevant editorial catch consumers’ attention and enable them to move easily from the editorial they were browsing to the company’s branded content.
Think Beyond Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is still fundamental to any digital marketing strategy, but it can’t offer guarantees as in reality Google, Yahoo! and Bing are in charge of what content consumers discover through search engines. Used effectively, SEO enables consumers, who are looking for something specific, to find the content that closely matches their interests easily. Yet brands with a real understanding of content marketing know the content they create is often only loosely related to the core keywords of the brand, product or service they want to promote.
Relying too much on SEO is a passive marketing strategy for reaching consumers with content. Search engines are useful when consumers are simply looking for information, however consumers will rarely rely on search engines to find content purely for entertainment purposes. Furthermore, the role of marketing is often to help consumers to find a solution to a problem — even if the consumer wasn’t actively trying to solve that problem at a specific time. That means it’s important to promote branded content, especially to garner potential consumers’ attention, rather than simply communicating to a brand’s already loyal customers.
Content marketing is an excellent strategy for brands to engage consumers and build brand awareness. However for campaigns to be successful and effective, brands balance their use of pull and push tactics of content dissemination. A content marketing campaign needs compelling content to attract consumers, and SEO professionals are a key component of successful strategies. However, deploying subtle yet active tactics to promote content is vital — especially to attract and engage new audiences.
Eder Holguin, CEO of Ideal Media
Originally published at www.mandmglobal.com.
