From Tweets to Tales

Most of you may think that content marketing is about blog posts, Twitter, Medium, Facebook and viral YouTube videos, yet content marketing is far more than that, is all about storytelling independent of the channels and platforms. 

Now, think about storytelling and stories, people are telling stories as long as they could speak and all the attention goes the ones who has the best stories. Best storytellers are the ones we remember more, we believe more and most importantly we buy more. For instance Hasbro and Marvel sit around the same to launch a comic series G.I Joe: A Real American Hero! in 1982, their goal was simple, just a strong background story that can sell itself, just like Kenner Toy Company’s Star Wars action figures had, and after seven years from establishment two of three boys in the same age has at least one G.I. Joe figure. 

According to CMI, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Meaning that your content marketing needs a long term strategy based on constructing a strong bound with your target audience and your brand by providing high quality and preferable content. 

Don’t think like one-off advertising in content marketing!

On the contrary of your everyday marketing operations, content marketing is where you make your customers and potential customer that you as a brand actually care about them. Especially, in nowadays, with the increasing rate of fast consumption of everything, people seek to feel cared more than ever before. 

So, how to conduct a content marketing strategy?

Since storytelling has changed over the past years, there is no one perfect strategy in this very subjective area of practicing but, as it stated before, content marketing’s main focus is not your advertising but answering the customers needs by content. 

In order to gather your ideas and defines your brand’s approach to content marketing, 3D Content Model is a very good structure to identify you, audience and the roadmap needed. Basically, the model has three individual steps;

1. Map the content to the pain points of your target audience.

2. Gather the appropriate contents as roots. 

3. Link the appropriate content to buying cycle of audience that shares the same pain point. 

By doing this mapping, focus will transfer from marketer to the people marketer is trying to reach.  You will be able to determined the effects and causes that drive people not to buy decision and able to offer your brands USPs to convince them. Moreover you will be able to identify more pain for your further contents and eventually convince more people to buy to increase sales. 

CMI has given six key points for content marketing,

• Content marketing strategy is different from your content strategy.

• There are no templates for developing a content marketing strategy that applied universally. 

• The strategy should include key business points, customer intentions and how your content efforts will address them. 

• A verbal strategy is not enough, you need to document it with images, videos, surveys etc.

• Content goals and mission are critical for business success so internalize them. 

• Based on your strategy, give it a periodic tune - up.

To sum up, content marketing is all about telling good stories for your target group to like, love and find themselves in it. Make sure that you underline that you value for your customers and potentials, keep it remarkable, make it sustainable and most importantly do not drop creating contents, continuously post and share them.