What is content marketing? In a nutshell, it is the method of effectively communicating with your customers without directly selling to them. We believe that it is about bringing your company and its story to life, engaging with customers in a coherent and fascinating manner. With 90% of brands now adopting this ‘new’ technique, you’d expect every email, article or post you read to be as enchanting and capturing as the next. However, as most of us are reminded on a daily basis, some brands simply lack the ability to relate.
The issues lay with the fact that some brands haven’t fully grasped how the concept works. They believe that fluffing out content with a few key words and a lack of coherence that they are, in-fact, using ‘content marketing’. Unfortunately for them (and the consumer), this is not the case. With all the information anyone could ever want ready at our disposal, it is essential that the content provided is compelling, relevant and above all else interesting. Otherwise, they’re only a click away from finding it elsewhere.
In a tad more detail (and a bit of a mouthful), the aim of content marketing is to develop a strategic technique by developing and distributing the relevant and intriguing content to attract and engage a clearly defined and identifiable target audience – with the final objective of acquiring a profitable action (and breathe out).
The brands that haven’t understood this have overlooked the crucial phrase in that definition, ‘to attract and engage a clearly defined and identifiable target audience’. Successful use of content marketing relies on a strong understanding of your consumer’s needs and providing them with content that is useful to them, making either their lives or jobs easier. Although it may seem blindingly obvious, meeting their needs and expectations will be the starting point for anything that you produce. Many can fall into the trap of creating content for multiple channels, relevant to a wide target audience. Content marketing is about, as written above, communicating to a clearly defined target audience, therefore putting in the time and effort to creating tailored and unique content is essential – something Voyage dedicates the majority of its time to!
When someone from this target audience consumes your content, they are instantly taking in the message that you as a brand are omitting. This will be instantly judged as to whether or not it is relevant to them, and if so, is the information compelling enough to engage them. So, I guess that here’s hoping that you haven’t simply stumbled upon this blog, and that through our own content quality, you have landed here for the information you need. We are hoping that you are our ‘understood target audience’.
At Voyage, we pride ourselves on being able to find and target your audience. We believe in incorporating content marketing into every piece of work we put out there. Check out our portfolio, and hopefully you will be the audience to some of the powerful messages we have helped brands to portray.
Shouldn’t every brand aim to be the leading provider for customer communications, to want to take the center stage and engage with the story-telling side of marketing?
2013: The year of Content Marketing.