What is content marketing?

Let’s first agree that content marketingis a type of marketing that entails using online platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and the like to deliver messages about products and services to an online audience. In a nutshell its videos, blogs, and any kind of social media posts to attract attention, generate sales and increase brand awareness.

Why do images matter?

The stats don’t lie and they tell us that content with images has more user engagement and generates more consumer interest than those posts or blogs without. Here are a few interesting stats to show the power of an image:

• Blogs with images get 94% more views than those without.
• Tweets with images get 150% more shares than those without.
• Including a photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%
• Engagement rates on Facebook for photos averages 0.37% where text only is 0.27%

Marketers talk about adopting a visual culture in your business. Yes, it means having a professional video and photographic catalogue of your products but it also means instilling a culture in your business in which you start to think in pictures. Get your employees on board and encourage them to use their visual creativity to take photos and videos of what they do on a daily basis. 

What is the recipe for a good content marketing strategy?

It’s important to give as much consideration to the images and videos you are sharing and posting as the content or text that go alongside them. A good combination of compelling text with visually innovative or interesting images is the perfect recipe for a good content creation.

Once you have done this and generated the content you believe is truly engaging it is necessary to return, after posting, to Google Analytics and see how your work has performed. While on an individual basis Google will tell you how your posts perform knowing what to do with this information poses the next conundrum. How do you build a strategy for developing content that meets different purposes for the different needs of your audience?

Here’s an interesting approach that bears consideration. Using a BCG* Growth-Share Matrix as a starting point, a similar tool has been designed for analysing content by Raconteur. It’s called the Content Creation Matrix and it will guide your efforts in creating content that meets differing needs across your audience.

The idea behind the Content Creation Matrix is that marketers should take all their previous content and place it into the relevant quadrant. Do this by analysing the response to each piece of content. This gives a good idea where your efforts are focused and where opportunities lie for additional work.

The Content Creation Matrix will guide your content strategy in as far as the resources you should devote to each new piece of content.

In the top left of your matrix are your star performers containing content that your audience loves. These pieces take time to produce but the resulting engagement justifies the effort.

Cash cows are in the bottom left. Often these are small easily consumed pieces that are interesting to your audience. They may be simple “cutdowns” of other substantive content pieces making them easy to produce. These pieces are important because they attract and hold the interest of your audience while more detailed, extensive thought-leadership content, is developed.

The picture is not that good for the top right quadrant. These pieces consume resources, take time to produce and do not resonate with your audience. They need to be avoided or repurposed.

Finally, the bottom right quadrant is reserved for your projects that you favour but others may not. This content is easy to produce and may serve a political purpose or answer and internal need. Most importantly your audience does not really care about this content.

Once this is done it is relatively easy to see where your resources are being expended and where your effectiveness is weak or strong. Either way, it will guide you to the areas that need more attention. Bear in mind that you should devote at least 70% of your resources to developing your best content with the remaining 30% going to experimentation, depending on your tolerance for risk.

And finally, research from Raconteur shows very clearly that it is important to make a statement. Do not post unremarkable, banal and generic material. Build engagement and response by taking a stand, expressing a viewpoint or making a statement.

If you need help with a content marketing strategy for your business, contact us today on 011 327 6871 or email julia@ebonyivory.co.za

Source: Raconteur.net

BCG* – Boston Consulting Group