Engage Customers with Effective Content Campaigns

The concept of content campaigns has by now become a popular technique in online marketing. The idea is simple. Instead of copy-pasting advertising formats from traditional platforms like TV, radio, and print into the digital universe – where those formats mostly fall on deaf ears – marketers had to come up with new, more interactive, and more engaging formulas that would capture their customers’ attention.

This has been true and continues to become more important for both customer-facing (B2C) as well as business-serving (B2B) businesses. Entertaining video campaigns, helpful industry eBooks, and informative podcasts – among many other content formats – have increasingly come to replace older, boring formats like display ads (inspired by print) and pre-rolls (inspired by TV).

And four years after Google implemented its Panda Update, which penalizes marketers who spam the Internet with low quality content, it is starting to become more clear what works and what doesn’t. So let’s take a look at how you can engage customers with effective content campaigns.

Effective (Do it!)

• Know Your Audience. It’s easy to put yourself and your needs first, but it won’t help you increase brand exposure or product sales. Resist the temptation of thinking about you (or your company) first and take some time to put on the shoes of your target customer. Then ask yourself, “When do my customers consume content?” “What are they truly interested in and engaged with?” and “How do they consume content? Online? Offline? Desktop? Mobile? Etc.”

• Be Authentic.  Once you understand what your audience is looking for, it’s time to think about ways in which you might satisfy them. It is important, however, not to get carried away with their demands and completely forget who you are and what your brand is all about. The ideal content lies somewhere between your customers’ demands and your company’s needs. Take Panera Bread’s “Clean Ingredients” campaign, for example; they asked regular people on the street to spell the complicated names of artificial ingredients that will no longer be in Panera Bread products. While this resulted in a fun and entertaining series of videos, it also provided some valuable information about nutrition, which is both what their consumers want as well as what their brand is about.

• Tell Stories. We all know this feeling; as soon as you can tell that someone is reading off a script or trying to market to you, your attention goes out the window and you want it all to be over very fast. Well, your potential customers are no different. So instead of boring them with generic marketing messages, use videos, audio, images, graphics and blogs to tell intriguing and unique stories. This can range from company-internal “secrets” to personal anecdotes and experiences. (See also Hootsuite’s example below.)

• Tie In Pop Culture. If you can find a clever, non-cheesy way to tie pop cultural references and trending topics into your content campaign, by all means do it. You would benefit not only from the organic traffic the trending topic is already providing, but if you do it right, you could also score bonus points with that particular fan community (which should, of course, align with your target audience). Hootsuite, a company that provides a social media management tool, did this perfectly with their video titled “A Game of Social Thrones.” Watch it here.

Ineffective (Don’t Do It)

• Care Little About Quality. In the race to getting audience attention, some marketers (they shall remain unnamed) have started creating content just for the sake of having content that reaches an audience. The old saying, “Good, fast, cheap – pick two,” rings true, however, when it comes to content marketing. If you don’t have the means to produce high quality content, you are probably better off not creating any content at all.

• Bombard Customers. Just as important as the quality of your content is its quantity. While you most certainly want to distribute fresh content on a frequent basis, you should avoid overwhelming your audience with too much goodness. Even if it is all of spectacular quality, too much of it can quickly turn into white noise. To keep an eye on audience engagement, try to use free tools like Google Analytics or bit.ly (a link shortener and tracker), or paid services like Hootsuite or Hubspot.

• Produce Something In All Available Content Formats. Even if you had a huge budget and staff, producing all kinds of content in all available formats might still not be a good idea. Instead, you should focus on the ones that make sense for and directly relate to your brand, products, and services. If you run an informative blog, for example, chances are that your readers will also be interested in reading an eBook … a YouTube style Vlogger video targeted at teenagers? Not so much.

• Take Yourself Too Seriously. Customers love it when brands have enough confidence to poke fun at themselves. IKEA, for example, showed the world that it can laugh at itself and its quirky culture with its web-series “Easy to Assemble.” So show a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously.

Whatever you end up doing with your digital content, do it like real human beings would. In general, users of the Internet and social media most respond to brands that show their “real” face rather than their well-polished marketing appearance more appropriate for traditional media platforms.