Bright Future of Content Marketing Business Today
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Bright Future of Content Marketing Business Today
Whether you are a start-up or a multi-million-dollar company, you need to reach out and connect to your audience, leads and customers. And that’s content marketing plays a key role in this part of the business process. So, what is content marketing and why is there a bright future business in it. Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. (Content Marketing Institute). Content is the present and future of marketing in the business world. Content marketing gives related and useful information to the audience and customers which provides solutions to their problems either at work or in their personal lives. Marketing can never happen without great content. It is part of the marketing process and shouldn’t be considered various aspects. There are several types of content marketing that can be part of your content marketing strategy such as online content, social media, infographic, blog, podcast, videos, paid ad, and more. There is the best type of content marketing that could work for your brand or product, so trying several types could help to find out which one could bring a valuable return to your content marketing campaign and profitability on your business. Creating content marketing could be simple if understanding the basics and tricks are consciously considered. Having the knowledge of the essential components and business models of content marketing will provide you the proper guide of where to give emphasis on your content marketing as well as defining the goals of what and where your content marketing can lead your brand or product. Some valuable statistics are worth discussing too about content marketing significance, why there is a future business on it and how it can effectively leverage your company or brand.
From the definition above, we can draw three most essential components of content marketing.
Target Audience
Above everything, when it comes to thinking of a business idea or solution or any business strategy, consideration of the target customer is the core of the entire process. In today’s business, building and creating a clear channel of communication, reinforcing loyal and trusting relationships with your target customer is more important than your product itself. Thus, creating content marketing for your product and business must take sincere actions on reaching out your target audience. Being able to communicate and build meaningful and purposeful relationships with the target audience, any content market efforts should create an appeal to them based on their needs, interest, benefits, and value. In this way, it can achieve the purpose of leveraging the business brand exposure and profitability.
Tangible Value
After considering the target audience, the next thing to think about in creating content is the tangible value you can provide to your audience. Considering what need are you able to provide with the audience to make their life easier or a content pertaining to provide solution to their problem. Is your content relevant, fulfilling, unique, and meaningful? To provide the expected value of the content, it must be engaging to the audience. Audience interaction and connection are so valuable. Aside from your content able to provide information, does it educate, provide answers to questions, and are they searchable?
Consistency
A single content effort could achieve success overnight, however, this is if you are lucky and only very few manage to achieve this. In most cases, content efforts take time, a longer time, and require consistency. Content produced and delivered has most always relied on the right timing or schedule for posting, in line with the standard quality, value, and significance of the audience. Publishing on a regular schedule and regular basis can provide your customer with the right timing that drives engagement and contents that resonate with your audience. With consistency, it can create a better experience for the audience and able to build trust and loyalty over your product or brand.
Content marketing goals could include the following:
Brand awareness
Companies widely use content marketing for brand awareness. With the power of digital technology, using content marketing to get the brand known is undeniably a power to create successful campaigns for your brand. However, it needs careful planning and execution as there is fierce and increased competition in the market. Mindful content creation and posting must be done. Remember that customers’ attention is an infinite resource. We usually have the idea that more content creations need to be noticed. This is the usual mistake for content marketers. Every content idea must have the aim to achieve your objectives of creating the content and releasing it to your audience for consumption. Ideally, content must deliver uniqueness. As said, in the sea of sameness, be unforgettable. Aim to stand out and make a difference in a way that your audience will remember your brand. Use of photos, videos, infographics and other visuals and audio that can effectively bring advantage to attract attention and provide substantial content to your audience and customers. It will talk more about your brand, your values, and the message you need to convey. Another important characteristic for your content to bring awareness to your brand is the significance of your identity. Your visual content must align consistently to your brand identity. If you are promoting sets of values, then stick to them so it can build and provide strong identification to your product or brand. This way your brand can be recognizable in an easy manner. Think of some famous brand, even the colors of the packing, the of their ads how they write contents like in press release, they have trademarks that are embedded already in peoples mind, no need for a second thought they would be able to tell what brand no matter what platform it is. Optimizations need not be forgotten to be considered. There is a need to analyze effectively to support the creation of unique content that can bring enormous results otherwise it will not strategically achieve its content creation purposes and it is all a waste of money and effort.
Audience Engagement
Now a days, your customer is even more important than your product itself in many aspects. With emphasis on customers’ centrality, you need to know more about the audience. Thus, creating the content for marketing must take primarily your audience target. So, if you aim for audience engagement, primarily, identify your audience. Think about their thoughts, emotions, ideas, values, and needs. What feeling would you want to evoke in them after watching or reading your content? How would you like them to comment or provide you feedback in return for what they buy, read, watched, or noticed? What value would your content be able to impact their life every time they engage with your brand? Beyond what you are selling, how could your brand be a part of their life? So, content marketing builds connections and relationships that will drive business profitability eventually.
Lead Generation
One of the struggles for content marketers is to lead generations. Very few marketers can only feel that their content marketing efforts are effective in terms of generating an audience with customers where the rest are feeling the vagueness of the business. As content marketing becomes the primary avenue of generating lead, many companies relied enormously on content marketing to generate leads and of course business growth. Content marketing can widely affect and influence customers’ behavior for their economic decision and purchasing process. It does not matter if your content is a 5 second video clip or 10 minutes read so long as it means the goal of generating sales for the business.
Driving loyalty
Once you have generated new leads from your content marketing effort done, the next job to do is to keep your customers loyal to your brand. Now, this is another challenge. How would you keep your current customer stay? It can be compared to a baby who gets a new toy and how would you keep him stuck on it without asking for another toy after another day. I believe many parents can relate to this comparison. Remember that your lead who turns to a new customer doesn’t create money at all for your company. The company doesn’t generate money on the first-time buyers. Mind you, this is not pyramiding networking! Many brands just recoup the money that they spent for the whole-time turning consumers into customers. In the initial stage of the relationship between your brand and your new customers, there are many opportunities to strengthen the relationship. So, reach out consistently and continuously your customers with the right message and right timing by providing helpful and informative content, send personalized and tailored emails and continue your brand visibility on the social media platforms to continuously keep them engage. Customer loyalty is not about repeat sales. There are several ways loyal customers drive incremental sales. (MMG 2023).
Increasing Sales and Profitability
Eventually this is the usual end goal of any content marketing effort. Of course, to bring in closed deals, creating new revenues, covering, and reducing, all the marketing costs and keeping on the top. Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. Content marketing is more efficient than traditional outbound marketing techniques like cold calling and email marketing. It generates three times as many leads, making it a highly effective approach to lead generation. (Aspiration Marketing 2023). Hence potential customers gain valuable information, creates connection to the brand, felt the sense of inclusiveness, meet their needs, and felt valued through the marketing campaigns, so they would continuously patronize, use, and stay with your brand resulting to growth for the company.
4 Content Marketing Business Models
If you are in the crossroad of content marketing either for your own brand or working in a company for marketing department and in charge for content marketing plan and creating content marketing strategy, one must fully understand the very, basic of content marketing business models.
Image from: content marketing institute (to upload)
Each fall along two scales. The first is the business integration scale. At one extreme, content marketing exists to simply support other parts of the marketing and communications teams as a contributor. The other end of the business integration scale is content marketing as a core business strategy.
The other scale is function. At one end, content marketing is internally focused, supporting internal constituencies for their strategic needs. On the other end, content marketing is externally focused on direct relationships with audiences, drawing in audiences to be managed with the same care that you might give customers. (Content Marketing Institute).
Player – content as contributor
Many companies and brands begin content marketing into this model. For business communication strategies, content campaign is considerably a player that contributes wider, broader and deeper demand generation, marketing the products and services for brand awareness and profitability.
Performer – content as center of excellence
Content marketing for your product to generate sales does not solely speak how your product is good, valuable and worth the money of your customers but also content speaks about your brand and company. It’s an outer expression of what is the inner values and information a brand has. This is why it’s considered as the support system to other parts of the organization. With this, content as the center of excellence can bring about building connections and relationships with customers.
Processor – content as service
For processor business model, an in-charge team could take the focus for some centralized content functions but not directly or exactly the creation of content. This is a part of specific strategic content services functionality. For example, a company may deploy an integrated, centralized content marketing strategy for a global region. The remit of this organization is to provide centralized governance, budget, best practices, and agency engagement services to all the practitioners who manage content. At the most sophisticated end of this spectrum, the strategic content group may perform this service for every aspect of all corporate content, including product, sales, marketing, documentation, etc. At the lower end of this spectrum, the group is simply a specialized resource to manage part of the strategic content for the business. It may, for example, manage only content management and SEO aspects of all content for the business. (Content Marketing Institute).
Platform – content as integrated business
Content marketing in businesses views content as integrated and sometimes fully functional within the business. The model may come through original build or through acquisition, the responsible teams will manage all the aspects of content marketing plan and strategy within confines of the brand. Larger companies may frequently use multiples of these models. And this shouldn’t be a surprise. It is sometime considerably an intelligent designed strategy as they viewed it. And there are occasions when multiple models are simply the organic growth of the responsible content teams within the organization. Whichever the case, the critical point is that as a leader in the business you should know which is which – and audit why you have what you have. As a business leader you must have the ability to leverage the different business models to optimize innovation and install the right models that will help you create the success you seek. (Content Marketing Institute).
Content Marketing Statistics to Know
Source:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-content-marketing-infographic
Below are some marketing statistics we could think about and have a good search further and discussion.
Marketers say sales, web traffic, and social engagement are the most critical metrics for measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy.
91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
Instagram is used by 65% of social media marketers, just behind Facebook at 67%.
Short articles/posts and videos are the top two content types that B2C marketers used in the last 12+ months.
22% of marketers say Instagram has the most growth potential in 2023 than any other platform.
Gen Z ranked Instagram as their favorite social media app in 2022.
50% of Millennial trust product recommendations from influencers.
44% of marketers say the most significant benefit of working with small influencers is that it’s less expensive.
Personal exploration on content marketing
This term, I have taken a course about content marketing. It was a valuable experience for me to be able to explore content marketing as I have only the basic knowledge about it knowing the fact that at this generation, content marketing is the king and unstoppable fire in the business world. On this online course, we were given the task of finding one company or brand, investigating their content marketing plan, and evaluating their marketing campaigns. We were asked to provide three marketing plans that would increase awareness, customer loyalty, and of course profitability. Interestingly, I have picked Netflix as I came across an article from Visual Capitalist about their unfavorable Q1 report on 2022. This is my sole point of view and not entitled to any official judgement for the company’s situation and intake to further strengthen their position in the market in terms of their annual revenues which could be related to their content marketing efforts. So here is my article.
Netflix: How can content marketing gain back its momentum?
While many companies were on the brink of closure and even collapsed during the pandemic time, Netflix is one of the few companies that earned its highest gain. With the “stay at home policy” watching TV at home was a compelling case resulting in limitless subscriber growth and profitability. However, in Q1 of 2022, instead of forecasting an increased number of subscribers, the company lost 200,000 of its customers. The key reasons were account sharing, increasing competition, and suspension of services in Russia. In this historic crash, is there any strategy that Netflix plan can do to regain its momentum? They do, like a lower-priced subscription plan that includes advertising. Would this work? Well, only time can tell if it can boost profitability and stop the bleeding.
How about working out on their content marketing plan? Netflix undeniably has a great marketing strategy that brings about innovation and modern-day technological growth that led to market value and brand exposure. So, what else could Netflix do? However, with this situation now, there are still many things they could do in terms of their content marketing.
What channels should they use and why?
Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube)
The young, tech-savvy users and anyone with digital connectivity are Netflix’s target market. They are of different age groups and demographics. Though Netflix presence in these platforms is already visible, however base on my observation, they are not engaging enough to draw more subscribers or retain their customers. Recently, most posts are with average number of comments and the content is on the same approach. I believe that Netflix can still work more on the substantial contents on their posts in these different social media platforms. Intriguing teasers and thrillers that can hook audience to watch and bring in new subscribers.
Blog post
Netflix has tons of blog posts also. However, I couldn’t find an enormous number of audiences reading and commenting on them. Some blog post sites are paid so it’s not openly accessible. New subscribers can be from audiences who engage more on blog posts reading as it will provide wider coverage and discussion about any program or updates of Netflix products and services. Audience engagement may take time to lead new customers, but it will pay off if the proper and right strategy on blog content creation and posting are done. There is no need to overhaul the strategy but to give emphasis on what are relevant and searchable ideas on the site. Not in a way of advertisement but information and awareness that will create engagement and profitability overall.
Personalized Emails
Subscribers and new target customers will feel valued by receiving personalized marketing emails. This kind of content marketing is efficient because Netflix can personalize and customize the emails based on the audience’s preferences of the movies, series, and programs they would like to watch and follow. This marketing email content should shun away on the usual marketing emails which at the end would ask the customer to sign up and purchase the product. Instead, these sorts of emails will provide personalized information on Netflix program updates which are aligned to the customer’s choice and favorites. Also, it can gain audience direct feedback and comments.
Impact on Netflix Branding
Netflix has explored the different content marketing strategy for the past years however with their recent business standing, losing vast number of subscribers, these few marketing suggestions giving emphasis on customers’ engagement and substantial marketing content post that would lead subscribers’ return, lead new subscribers, and retain current loyal subscribers. I highlighted audience engagement because in business today, it’s the customers who decide where your products or services could go. Their purchasing decisions are the core of any business pipeline. Being able to connect with the audience can create seamless communication channels to lead to awareness and insightful and solid business decision making. Outsiders’ ideas are so valuable and cannot be ignored. Substantial marketing content can also increase audience loyalty and spark interest for new subscribers and even the return of those who suspended their subscriptions. Working out more on Netflix content marketing is just one of the many things that they could do to regain their glory. But such content marketing plan match with appropriate marketing strategy can sure take a win eventually. It should not cause another pandemic (time fate forbids!) for them to gain the same momentum. Also, aside from these marketing revolutions, sales strategies such as pricing and subscription terms and conditions, better project programs and other issues, should be considered by Netflix experts’ team.
My final words
Everything above is just from my point of view based on the given situation they have now and how I see that they can leverage their existing content marketing plan as a few of the ways to gain back their users and bring in new subscribers. I am not an expert to feel righteous on this matter but simply an outsider who sees the situation in this way. I am hopeful that Netflix can strategically find further the right game-changer strategy for revolutionizing the future of television that will give them another massive financial return.
Summary
It is quite unimaginable how content marketing can bring your brand into success and at the same time can just put all your efforts and resources into vain. So, conscious planning of what type of content marketing you are going to embark for your brand or what model of content marketing you need to look into for your content marketing strategy, always give a thought of the significant elements and your goals for the creation of your content marketing. With the power of internet, convenience and immediate gratification are always at hand, so any brand, company, organization can truly maximize its benefits in order to connect to its audience, establish and make known your identity and generate profitability either you are a small starting company or a big brand in the market. The magnitude and volume it could speak about your product, your brand values and culture are simply within the context of your content marketing.
References:
Dacosta, C. 2019. Forbes. 3 Reasons why brand story telling is the future of marketing. Read on 18.9.2023
https://www.forbes.com/sites/celinnedacosta/2019/01/31/3-reasons-why-brand-storytelling-is-the-future-of-marketing/?sh=719f79ff55ff
Harris, Jodi. 2028. Content Marketing Institute. Road Map to Success: Resources to Refresh Your Content Marketing Program. Read on 11.11.2023
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/resources-content-marketing-success/
Jesse. 2023. Aspiration Marketing. How Effective Content Marketing Drives Sales and Business Growth. Read on 29.11.2023
Mindstream Media Group. 2023. How to Boost Customer Loyalty With Content Marketing
Read on 29.11.2023
https://mindstreammediagroup.com/how-to-boost-customer-loyalty-with-content-marketing/
Santiago, E. 2023. Bubspot. The State of Content Marketing in 2023 [Stats & Trends to Watch]. Read on 25.11.2023
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-content-marketing-infographic
Image post
Rose, Robert. 2018. Content Marketing Institute.4 Business Models for Content Marketing.
Read on 20.11.2023
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/business-model-content-marketing/
Sources: (Netflix Content Marketing Case Study)
Lu, M. 2022. Visual Capitalist. Why Investors Tuned Out Netflix.
Read on 10.11.2023
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/why-investors-tuned-out-netflix/?fbclid=IwAR2VdWCNOj3sDEgsZoaGAkoJpob_W16w5qzR-21xxaHy-eh4h8rYQstyzhI
Arun, R. 2023. Simpli Learn. A Case Study on Netflix Marketing Strategy.
Read on 10.11.2023
Ahmed, M. 15.11.NY. Netflix: Analyzing and Predicting Movie Ratings.
Read on 20.11.2023.
https://medium.com/@muhammadahmed3691/netflix-analyzing-and-predicting-movie-ratings-90abd40f88b4
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