Content Marketing
Ah…content marketing. Perhaps one of the most common terms we hear when it comes to digital marketing but what does it mean?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, “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.” Wow. That’s a bit of a mouthful but it essentially boils down to this:
Create awesome content that your customers will be interested in and make sure they get to see it.
Sounds simple? There’s more to it than meets the eye.
High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online.
Kristina Halvorson Author, Content Strategy for the Web
Content marketing in NZ
Whilst content marketing has been around for some time now, here in New Zealand, there are not as many companies doing it well as there should be.
That’s where we come in.
Whilst content marketing could be seen as a move away from traditional marketing, it all boils down to the same thing. You need to provide customers with relevant and interesting content that will improve their understanding of what you do and/or sell.
As a full-service digital marketing agency, we have been working with clients big and small throughout New Zealand to create content that not only drives traffic, but also reaches potential customers who previously didn’t know we existed. Content marketing, when done well, allows us to increase our target audience by reaching out in ways that were previously not part of our marketing mix. It allows us to create content that targets different keywords to our product or service focussed pages and allows the brands we work with to appear in more search results than ever before.
Make customers the heart of your stories
Ann Handley Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
Adding value through content marketing
Content marketing without a strategy is just stuff. And whilst some of that stuff may hit the mark, most of the time you’re just adding more content to your site that people aren’t going to visit.
Don’t do that. And don’t let an agency do that for you. Don’t judge an agency’s success on the number of articles, videos and other content they produce. Base success on traffic, time on page and most importantly, sales.
We work closely with you to find out what type of content is going to add real value to your customers. Then we create a strategy that means your customers will see that content on the platforms they are using, at the right time.
Mediocre content will hurt your brand more than doing nothing at all.
Joe Pulizzi Founder, Content Marketing Institute
Three steps to content marketing success
We take a three-step process to our content marketing strategy:
1. Research and content audit - what content do you already have and what are your competitors producing? Then we know what we need to produce to fill the gaps.
2. Content production - once we know where the gaps are, we work on producing content that is 10x better than the content that already exists. We create content that best fits the needs of the audience whether it’s a blog, article, video, infographic, podcast…
3. Content distribution - this is where a lot of hard work and effort of agencies goes down the toilet. No matter how great your content, without great distribution, no one is ever going to find it. We look at the best platforms (including social media) for each individual piece of content – not just taking a piece of content and putting it everywhere.
One thing we focus on here at Digital Hothouse is putting the customer front and centre. Every piece of content we create is done with them in mind, not search engines. We also try to make our clients’ customers the focus of the stories we are telling. We find that this content seems to resonate much better with the target audience and drives huge engagement. Winner.
What content do we create?
Whenever we talk to a client about content marketing, they always want to know about the types of content we create. The answer to this depends on the client. For some, it’s as simple as writing informative blog posts, listicle type articles or news items. For others, we carry out original research around a key topic and then use that research to create infographics, video content or even white papers.
The truth is, there is no ‘one-size fits all’ approach to content marketing. It should be an integral part of your overall marketing efforts and your content marketing strategy should tie in with the objectives of your overall marketing strategy.
Content marketing is not a sales pitch
Content marketing is not about selling. It’s about informing and educating and allowing people to make an informed purchase decision. People want to learn before they buy. They want to be educated rather than pitched. Your content marketing strategy needs to meet the educational and entertainment needs of your audience whilst ticking the right boxes for Google.
Fresh, relevant content that people both click on and link to. Those are the signals that Google are looking for. When we create a fresh piece of content, we ask ourselves this, “Is this piece of content better than the content that already exists?” If the answer is no, then we go back to drawing board. Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz, states that your content shouldn’t just be better than the content that’s already out there, it needs to be 10x better. That’s our benchmark.
A good content marketer can empathize with their audience and can therefore understand what topics they should create content on, what tone of voice to use, and what channels to promote the content in.
Rand Fishkin Wizard of Moz
Why Digital Hothouse?
- We create content strategies that deliver ROI
- We create content that is 10x better than the stuff already out there
- We research the right content for the right platform for your business
- We attend world-leading content marketing conferences, learning from the very best