In a recent study commissioned by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, the greatest challenge (as reported by 41% of respondents) before B2B marketers is -
“Producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers”
The tables are turning in favor of stickiness factor of content. Stickiness is not a rare commodity if your content marketing initiative is driven by strategy. The strategy is at the heart of every successful content marketing initiative.
To give an example, Coca-Cola is undergoing a major overhaul in its strategy – from creative excellence to content excellence. If we analyze Content 2020 and other successful content marketing strategies, we stumble upon content secrets which are only too familiar.
These are -
1.Story Telling
Storytelling never falls out of fashion. Much of the collective wisdom that we have today was handed down in form of anecdotes and fables. All stories more or less follow the Three Act Structure consisting of three parts – the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution. Or how else you explain, the opening scene – also the last scene sans the missing pieces of the puzzle – getting resolved in the climax in majority of Hollywood movies?
But, before you rush to your content strategist to conjure up an amusing story, a word of caution – there is never a bad story, only a bad storyteller.
2.Cohesion and Consistency
Consistency and Cohesion form the backbone of a successful content marketing initiative. Coca-Cola has lumped them into a single entity and likes to call it liquid content in its Content 2020 internal marketing brief. The whole idea of “Liquidity” is that content needs to have fluid dynamics as opposed to solid rigidity that it becomes impossible to improvise the strategy and gaseous transience that the content fails to stick to the brand objectives and becomes the noise that gets the brand nowhere.
3.Don’t Preach, Just Teach
Content marketers, more often than not, make the mistake of assaulting the audiences’ mindshare with Orwellian marketing speak – subtle or otherwise. And audience, almost instinctively, senses it and inoculates itself from such assault.
Conclusion
On the flipside, all the successful content marketing programs, flourish on the trust built overtime by continuously offering valuable information to the prospects/customers. Content marketing in its current avatar, has been around for hundreds of years. It was as early as 1930s that John Deere’s Furrow magazine proactively started building and nurturing relationships by educating farmers about latest agricultural technologies.
In short, resist the temptation to pitch.
