how content marketing drives brand engagement

How Content Marketing Drives

Brand Engagement

An Extract from

The Future of Marketingby Nick Johnson

Original Research on how major brands use content to drive

marketing success

incite-group.com

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How Content Marketing Drives Brand Engagement

“ One must require more marketers to develop content capabilities so there’s a way to engage other than selling and pushing. Marketers must be looking to stay relevant when people aren’t in a place to buy.”

– John Kennedy, CMO of Xerox

As we’ve seen, “content marketing” is an increasingly popular and important term in the world of marketing in 2015. Before going into detail on what is a broad and somewhat amorphous topic, it’s worth trying to define the term. Content marketing is simply about using engaging, relevant content to attract an audience.

It’s about finding valuable, shareable insights to engage – not sell to – an audience.

It’s a concession that customers have a choice and that you’ve got to offer more than a shiny sales message to get their buy-in. And it’s a critical pillar in a forward-looking marketing strategy based on authenticity, relevance, and transparency. Content marketing is remarkably powerful in a world in which customers are overwhelmed by sales messages, where social media has given relationship building the capacity to scale enormously, and where brands are starved of customer attention.

That’s why 64% of marketers say that content marketing is “definitely” important and “working really well” for them, with an additional 30% saying that’s “probably” the case, as you can see in Figure 9.1.

DEFINITELY: It’s a strategy that’s working really well for us 64% PROBABLY: We’re experiencing some benefit from a push toward delivering more content marketing 30% POSSIBLY: We can see content marketing is important, but we’ve not really gotten any benefits from it yet 6% NO: It’s a waste of time 0%

FIG 9.1

Is content marketing important?

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Given all that, it’s entirely unsurprising that a huge seventy-four percent of marketers will “definitely” do more content marketing over the next five years, and an additional 19% will “probably” do so, as you can see in Figure 9.2

The popularity of content as a marketing strategy is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of a broader shift in marketing to reflect customer power. Marketing is no longer about positioning your product and then pushing people down a funnel. It’s about attempting to engage a bored population that is skeptical of sales messages and almost omnipresent advertising.

In an age when customers hold the power, the marketer’s job is to position the brand as part of a conversation on increasingly powerful social networks. Content – stories, videos, audio, and more – is a powerful tool to do just that while also building a longer-lasting relationship at the same time. If we treat marketing over social media as similar to creating a good impression at a dinner party (for more on this, see Chapter 10 , “The Opportunity – and Imperative – of Conversation”), then content is the stories you use to reel people in and entertain them around the canapés.

DEFINITELY 74% PROBABLY 19% POSSIBLY 6% NO 1%

FIG 9.2

Do you plan on doing more content marketing over the next five years?

Opportunity to learn moreAt the Incite Marketing Summit (NYC, October 27-28), speakers from the world’s biggest and most successful brands will be sharing their insight – and skin-in-the-game experience – on how to leverage the unique benefits of content marketing. You can join them!Click here to find out more

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Fundamentally, content allows brands to be more worthy of a customer’s time than the competition. Of course, it’s rather difficult. As brands become authors and publishers, they effectively have to enter an entirely new industry.

Consider the four key challenges in scaling a content strategy highlighted in Figure 9.3:

1. Creating content of the requisite quality2. Ensuring produced content is relevant to your target audience3. Disseminating content in the right way4. Measuring the impact of content strategy

Working out the sort of content our customers want 23% Producing content of the requisite quality 41% Disseminating content the right way 14% Measuring the impact of our content strategy 16%Other 1%

FIG 9.3

What’s the hardest part of content marketing?

Create Content of the Requisite Quality

Companies must compete for the attention of customers via the creation of engaging content, so quality is a core consideration. I remember discussing how this might end up. I joked with several CMOs that if things continue at this rate, with a rapid increase in the quality of, and budget for, content marketing, we’ll end up with brands rivaling Hollywood. Companies will plough more money into content in an increasingly essential attempt to grab customers’ attention and put that brand front of mind.

Then in February 2014, The Lego Movie launched. Brands are already rivaling Hollywood. It’s somewhat unsurprising, therefore, that 41% of marketers say that producing content of the right quality is the biggest challenge they’re facing right now.

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Relevance: Appealing Directly and Engagingly to Your Customers

Twenty-seven percent of marketers say the most challenging part of building a content marketing strategy revolves around working out what the customer wants – determining what content will appeal to and engage them.

It’s another manifestation of the “relevance” pillar of marketing as ART. The content you disseminate must be engaging, useful, and valuable in some way to the target audience you’re attempting to appeal to. Again, we can revisit the social media dinner party: The stories you tell your grandparent are somewhat different to those you tell your best friend. It’s the same with content marketing. As with traditional marketing campaigns, picking the right message for your customer is essential. What’s more, particular target audiences want their content delivered via a particular medium, or via a particular platform.

When striving for relevance, companies tend to focus on either content that aims to be useful or content that aims to be entertaining.

Content That Is Useful

A great example of useful content comes from HubSpot, the marketing software provider. Hubspot is a business to business (B2B) company – companies in the B2B space have been leaders in content marketing for some time, largely because of the way marketing works in the B2B space. Customers and products tend to be of higher value.

The purchase cycle is longer, and more is spent on individual customer acquisition. Therefore, the value proposition offered by content marketing is more obvious.

HubSpot sells a marketing technology. The goal of its content campaign is to make its owned media a valuable destination for the target audience to spend time at. The company thus spends an awful lot of time generating white papers and other insights to share with its community.

Not only does this content position HubSpot as an authoritative voice on marketing best practice (thus increasing loyalty, trust, and the likelihood of a longer-term customer relationship), but it’s also designed to highlight that HubSpot does the job these customers are looking to do better than any of their competitors. The use cases and step-by-step guides that the white papers cover all use HubSpot as the tool for getting the job done.

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Content That Is Entertaining

The video opens in a close-up on Jean-Claude Van Damme’s face.

His voiceover begins to tell us that his life has been made up of his fair share of bumpy roads and buffeting winds. Through focus and a relentless drive for perfection, he’s overcome all challenges. He points out that the precision engineering of his body has allowed him to master “the most epic of splits.”As he solemnly intones an inspirational version of his life story, staring directly into the camera, that camera pans out. First, we realize that he is standing on the wing mirrors of two Volvo Globetrotter articulated trucks.

Next, it becomes apparent that the trucks are moving. Backward.

Fast. Finally, as the voiceover reaches “the most epic of splits,” the trucks begin to part, forcing Van Damme to do the splits – 12 feet up, fast, and in reverse. As the camera swings around him and the rapidly reversing trucks, some text is superimposed onto the screen: This test was set up to demonstrate the stability and precision of Volvo Dynamic Steering. 1

Seventy-seven million people saw that video on Volvo’s own You- Tube channel alone. When they finished with it, they saw links to other “Volvo Live Test” videos, including one featuring a gerbil driving a truck using some sort of mechanical contraption that converts the rodent’s scurrying around an exercise wheel into steering a several-ton truck. Another shows a ballerina performing on the roof of a truck as it speeds down a highway.

The Volvo video campaign is a high water mark for entertaining content. The company managed to broadly entertain and engage a huge audience, considerably raising the general population’s awareness of the Volvo brand and products. What’s more, for the core target audience of truck drivers and fleet owners, there’s a “dog whistle” that only they can hear – a series of specific references to the truck’s attributes that will further engage this core audience.

This group can, for example, appreciate the difficulty inherent in driving two trucks with such precision that Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t end up in a crumpled heap on an airport runway. They can appreciate a ride so smooth that a ballerina can perform on the roof. They can appreciate steering so precise that a half-pound gerbil can control it.

Volvo commissioned market research firm GFK to survey 2,200 transportation companies (half existing Volvo customers, half customers of the competition) about the impact these “Live Test” videos had on their brand perception.

The results are persuasive. YouTube subscribers for the brand rose from 3,500 to 90,000, and Volvo Trucks website traffic increased from 175,000 to over 300,000. In total, the value of the earned media generated was somewhere around $150 million. More importantly, the highest-performing in the series of videos, Technician, convinced 39% of viewers to take action (visit a website or contact a dealer); while another 19% said they intended to take action in the future. 2 Those are strong results from what at first glance looks like a relatively light-hearted brand awareness exercise.

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It’s worth pointing out the fine balance the overall campaign had to achieve. The Van Damme video (clearly, the most popular of the six videos, with 77 million views) was also the least impactful in terms of influence on brand perception. It seems that, in striving to entertain a broad group, the brand lost out in depth of impact on their actual target market.

Disseminate Content in the Right Way

“It’s critical to have really great content – and for it to be flexible. Digital assets really, rather than content – things that you can repurpose across different devices, different resolutions – a version of your story that is quick and seamless to get out, and is rich and engaging. Whether that’s user-generated or internally generated, ultimately it’s all content.”

– Marco Ryan, Chief Digital Officer for Thomas Cook

Fifteen percent of marketers point out that their main challenge in building a content marketing strategy is to disseminate that content in the right way.

For content marketing to augment rather than slow a push toward a more agile, speedy, and nimble marketing campaign, it’s essential that content be disseminated quickly and flexibly.Therefore, you must think deeply about the format and delivery mechanism. As Marco Ryan points out, content must be flexible. You must be able to build up a library of content that you can disseminate across a multitude of new marketing platforms at any one time.

Measure Impact and Track Success

The fourth challenge inherent in the creation of a successful content marketing strategy is to accurately measure the impact of a campaign and activity. Fifteen percent of marketers say this is the main challenge that they face (refer to Figure 9.3).

It’s essential that at all times a marketer be able to track success appropriately and quickly. Equally, it’s important that the marketer be able to use those figures and trends to impact and change marketing campaigns on the fly.

First, marketers must pick sensible metrics, not vanity metrics. As Eric Reis, author of the enormously influential Lean Startup, puts it:

“The majority of data available in off-the-shelf analytics packages are what I call vanity metrics. They might make you feel good, but they don’t offer clear guidance for what to do.

Evolve your marketing strategyUsing content to drive brand engagement is just one part of this year’s agenda for the Incite Marketing Summit (NYC, October 27-28 2016). Whether your focus is Content and Storytelling, Marketing Attribution or Personalization and One-to-One Marketing, the unique tracked agenda makes the #InciteSummit the only conference to tackle your key priorities in the depth you require.Click here to find out more


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“When you hear companies doing PR about the billions of messages sent using their product, or the total GDP of their economy, think vanity metrics. But there are examples closer to home. Consider the most basic of all reports: the total number of hits to your website. Let’s say you have 10,000. Now what? Do you really know what actions you took in the past that drove those visitors to you, and do you really know which actions to take next? In most cases, I don’t think it’s very helpful.”3

Second, marketers must be in a position to change things quickly. The metrics used must report back figures in a quick enough time frame to make changes while a campaign is ongoing. Whether that means using a slightly different version of a video or incorporating a new “snackable” piece of content into a Facebook advertising campaign is up to the numbers.

The vast majority of marketers anticipate doing more content marketing in the immediate future. It works well and drives engagement. But to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace, it’s going to be essential for quality, relevance, and measurement to improve. If a company is successful in building the right content – getting it out via the right channels and format, and measuring the right KPIs around it – then the impact on marketing’s success can be major, as Volvo could tell you.

What’s more, in an age where companies are increasingly starved of the attention of their customers, good content marketing grabs that attention and deepens engagement in a way other marketing strategies simply cannot.

This white paper is an extract from Nick Johnson’s “The Future of Marketing”, published by Pearson. To purchase your copy – with a 40% discount – quote FUTURE40 when purchasing at the FT Press store – www.ftpress.com/store

Endnotes

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10

2. James Swift, “Van Damme Spot Is Least Effective Volvo Ad,” Campaign (1 April 2014). www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1288088/

3. Eric Ries, “Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics,” FourHourWorkWeek.com (19 May 2009). http://fourhourworkweek.

com/2009/05/19/vanity-metrics-vs-actionable-metrics/

Featuring interviews and case studies with:

Written by

Nick Johnsonfounder of the Incite Group

For further extracts – and a 40% discount – head to nickjohnson.co/future-of-marketing

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