A Dummy’s Guide to Content Marketing

What if there were a better way to showcase your product than by placing it in a digital show glass?  A way that inspired and captivated your audience, turning them into brand advocates?

Let me take you on a journey into the creative world of content marketing

What Is Creative Content Marketing?

Creative content marketing refers to an approach to content marketing that creates indelible impressions across your touchpoints. The aim of a creative content marketing campaign is to give your audience a memorable experience that they can reference and share.

The average person spends 7 hours daily consuming content, that’s a quarter of their waking hours. Any piece of content that lacks a creative punch will get lost in the sea of the subconscious. This is why creative content marketing is so crucial.

It helps break the autopilot flow, grab the attention of your users, and leave them with something to think about (or smile about).

Allow me to walk you through the top 5 ways to implement a creative content marketing strategy for your company.

1. Journey With Your Audience

In medical school, we were told that the patient is the best textbook. Our lecturers used this to illustrate how important it was to observe and learn from patients—as opposed to solely theory-based learning. In marketing, it’s pretty much the same. Your audience is the best textbook.

Audiences are dynamic and intelligent. It only makes sense to gather direct insights from your audience (zero and first-party data). It’s absurd to rely on old marketing models and 3rd party data gotten when you have your audience right before you.

Make it a point of duty to gather audience insights by using surveys, replying to comments on your posts, and directly interviewing your customers. The insights you gain from these activities will help you better understand and grow with the changing needs of your audience.

With this, you can build a creative marketing framework that astounds your audience.

2. Own Your Industry

Understanding your industry, as obvious as it seems, is something that is easily glossed over by startup founders. A good understanding of how things work in your industry begins with research. Visit niche forums and platforms like Indiehackers, Quora, Hackernoon, and Reddit to find out what people are saying about your industry.

Next, develop well-balanced articles describing trends in your industry. This helps build thought leadership.

Finally, choose a forum or social media platform to build an audience. It greatly helps with brand aesthetics when a founder shares interesting and expert content regularly. In no time, you can build an army of brand advocates for your startup.

Your objective is to be a market leader in your chosen sector, so the research never ends.

3. Create Content With Purpose

Content marketing isn’t merely content creation. It’s a strategic way of getting into your audience’s head and staying there. Copywriters are the kings and queens of this domain. It doesn’t matter what kind of content you’re putting out (blogs, video, audio, infographics, social media posts, etc), you should get the copy prepared by a creative copywriter.

Copywriters have the ability to speak to emotions and appear relatable. That’s what you need for purposeful content marketing.

Additionally, combining research with a creative marketing framework can wow your audience at every touchpoint. For instance, your pricing page could end with something interesting like “Don’t see a plan you like? That’s okay, send us an email and we’ll prepare a quote just for you.” As simple as this may seem, it makes you appear thoughtful and human.

The idea is to make a difference using content.

4. Amplify and Repurpose

Content amplification simply means distributing your content strategically to give it a wider reach. And content repurposing is the practice of changing the style and format of a content piece to suit different platforms.

These two techniques go hand-in-hand. Repurposing helps to make it fit to publish on different platforms so as to optimize the value of the original piece of content. Sharing the repurposed content across your media channels (paid and earned) helps to generate traffic and much-needed buzz. It’s like magic! Almost.

You take a piece of great scoring content and turn it into a gift that keeps on giving.

Take, for instance, you make a blog post titled “The next big thing in content marketing”. Amplifying this article will look a lot like this:

• Tweak the name of the article, add a little more stuff and pitch it to 3rd-party platforms much like Top Digital Agency.
• Distill the important bits into an infographic meant for Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
• Create a carousel with tips on making high-converting content—for Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
• Make a thread on Twitter outlining the dos and don’ts of content marketing
• Piece together everything and create an ebook
• Finally, share, share, share.

Of course, you’d need to ensure everything links back to the original article on your website.

There’s more to content amplification. You could add videos, webinars, courses, etc. The goal is to keep a good piece of content running in its prime for as long as possible.

One great content amplification campaign is the current world record holder for the longest-running advertising campaign.

5. Copy From Other Niches

I know this seems weird, but it’s the absolute right way to start if you’re clueless. When launching your content marketing campaign, humble yourself and learn from others. I’ll teach you how to copy rightly (¬‿¬).

Say, you have a clothing line—you sell great tees and trousers—and you want to find a way to market your brand through content; perhaps by starting with a catchy tagline. The first thing you should do is check what your leading competitors are doing; this will give you context and register a frame of reference.

Next, you proceed to learn about another niche that is complimentary to yours—such as the footwear industry.

You can simply lift words from multiple taglines and tweak them to fit your brand and you’re good to go! You already have a proven and tested tagline. You’ve saved yourself hours of brainstorming.

This is a strategy for starters though, as you grow, you’ll develop a style based on your value proposition and all copies you produce will stem from the foundation of your value proposition. Bear in mind that no marketing strategy, no matter how good, is a substitute for a good product.

A Creative Marketing Story

In the 1980s, Absolut Vodka wasn’t performing so well and sales weren’t so good.

How did the brand end up dominating the industry, you ask? It launched a series of artistic promotional campaigns to grab the attention of the world.

After the campaign’s launch, the brand collaborated with various artists who depicted Absolut bottles in unique and creative ways. The campaign was so successful that 1,500 separate ads were launched over the course of 25 years!

Absolut had 2.5% of the vodka market and sold 10,000 cases before the campaign. As a result of the campaign, Absolut imported 4.5 million cases per year in the late 2000s and had 50% of imported vodka in the US.

Through the years, the bottle’s profile has been used to mimic, for instance, a ski slope, a swimming pool shaped like a bottle for the Los Angeles market, and a Central Park bottle for the New York market. Absolut ads in Philadelphia showed Ben Franklin wearing bottle-shaped spectacles.

Absolut Vodka absolutely rocked by repurposing the same content to fit different markets and audiences. A 25-year campaign, now that’s something!

Closing Thoughts

Creative content marketing isn’t an option in today’s saturated markets. Furthermore, your potential customers are consuming tons of content daily. The only way to cut through the content noise is through creative content marketing.

Be intentional, be creative, and leave indelible impressions, always.