Content marketing – easy to do, hard to get right

It’s 2017, so most brands now realise that content marketing is a key part of online success.  

And while the dominant opinion is that content marketing requires big budgets, large teams and  massive resources, I’ve seen the opposite. Companies with small budgets, tight teams and limited resources can make a huge impact online, because it’s the story and emotional connection that counts.

Here’s three ways to nail low-budget content marketing:

1. Build an organisation of story hunters

Every brand has a unique set of stories at their fingertips. But in order to uncover and curate content that will integrate with your brand and engage your audience, you need ‘story hunters’ on the front lines.  

For example, I’ve found that best customer stories often come out  of call centres or storefronts —i.e the most customer-facing positions. And if you want to uncover the most moving content on a company’s’ internal values and ethics, look to the legal team writing interesting policy or HR department driving corporate social responsibility.

At ntegrity, we conduct an organisation-wide survey to determine the skills and interests of staff within an organisation. Through the findings our clients have discovered hidden gems and support for digital storytelling amongst colleagues they didn’t know existed. The key is for Marketing teams to get outside of the marketing department, and closer to the pulse of the organisation, while also setting up responsive systems and processes enabling your team to feed content back to a central hub.

Our clients Vinnie’s Australia has done an amazing job of this on a small budget. In just three years, they’ve grown their Facebook page to over 120,000 likes, achieved a 125% increase in traffic to their website, turned themselves into an online leader, as well as won industry awards for their content.

2. A strong strategy

To do great content marketing and storytelling that contributes to your overall goals, you need a strong digital strategy in place. Your strategy should underpin and guide the messages and stories you want to tell, so the individual narratives work together. As content marketing and storytelling cross the traditional boundaries of departments and silos, having buy-in from the Executive and Senior Level early on is key.

The best content strategies:

• have a digital vision that works towards your company’s business goals;
• are informed by data and market insights to ensure the approach is backed by evidence and not just assumption;
• are customer-centred, and reflect the actual needs, fears, desires and frustrations of your customers (not your company!);
• have clearly defined channel’s, including their purpose and usage; and
• clearly tie in your product or services’ unique value proposition
  

e.g. the structure of your strategy

3. Creating a content culture

Now it’s time to get cracking! With a strategy in place and allies in different departments, you’re ready to refine and publish the stories that start surfacing. We call this “creating a content culture”.

Where should you start?

• Share your digital vision across the company.
• Empower staff through giving them digital training.
• Create a constant feedback loop, so the entire company see the stories in action and can celebrate their results, and therefore are motivated to source new stories.

Getting content marketing right has everything to do with your internal culture. To help you get started we’ve created a easy-to-use template to help your team source stories from within your organisation. Email me here if you’d like one!

Source: Richenda Vermeulen, CEO of ntegrity