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I have been doing some research around the area of content marketing. It’s a very active field with lots of going on. In fact, I would probably say it’s pretty hyped up at the moment. I don’t mean to deny its value (I actually think it has a lot going for it), but it strikes me that on many occasions people ‘do’ content marketing for the wrong reasons.
Those reasons relate to basic human nature. If your idea of content marketing is producing an online film to go viral (a presumptuous ambition to have in the first place), then you might think you are setting yourself up for having some fun and who wouldn’t want to do that? I don’t wish to claim expertise on what make something go viral, but an uncontroversial requirement is that it is enjoyable – think of the Tippex ad , or Old Spice , or Evian babies .
Another factor that makes content marketing alluring is that it helps you look cool. It lets the brand in question puts itself in the center of what is getting everyone’s attention at that moment. The following is a telling quote from the editor of now abandoned People.co.uk site: “I want to put clients in the context of the zeitgeist.” Perhaps I am pushing it but I hope you get the idea.
I think the reality of content marketing is that it is a lot of hard work to do it well. Coca Cola, who are very very big on ‘content’ (check out this video to get their take on it), have ditched the standard corporate website for something that is very content rich. Instead, Coca Cola has the Journey, which featured more than 1,200 pieces of content in the first year – doing that is very different to updating some pages every week or so. And I haven’t even touched upon Coca Cola’s main marketing activity: all the ads, posts, tweets, films, events etc it carries out across the globe to keep people entertained and talking about and around the brand.
And having looked at many different examples of content marketing in an attempt to find case studies worth discussing, what are my favourites? Well, I must confess I am going to put in a plug for the unsexy but very useful supermarket magazines. It’s all too easy to forget they count as content marketing. They have been around for several decades now and are actually pretty huge. They are in the top ten of all most circulated magazines in the UK with the publications from Tesco and Asda at their head.
Supermarket magazines are not flashy but they are valued by their audience and give the impression they really get the world of their customers, pondering great unanswerables such as ‘how do I make healthy, tasty, inexpensive food on a daily basis’, ‘how I get through daily chores without losing it’, ‘how can my family and I make the most of our time together’ ad infinitum.
Pretty compelling stuff – at least it is to me – a sometime suburban housewife.