Content is King: 4 Tips for Creating Great Content Marketing

Here at Merlot Marketing, we believe that great brands are built where the heart and mind intersect. It may sound like a high level venture, but a big part of capturing that special something is in the day-to-day, with digital content marketing. We recently participated in the Sacramento Business Journal’s Connectionopolis event, “Content is King,” where Manager of Digital Media Strategy for the California Lottery, Ryann Petit-Frere, shared with us some tools that can help create a solid content marketing plan.

1. Understand Your Audience

The top priority for all content strategy plans, regardless of industry, is to understand your audience; their attitudes, beliefs, activities, and desires should drive the content. Only when you understand your audience can you motivate them. The most common mistake in content marketing is the one-sided approach of constantly sharing a company’s activities and accomplishments. The key to creating successful content that resonates is to create conversation. Additionally, content should be built to take your audience along a consumer journey, with an end goal of action.

MM Content is King blog

 

2. Develop Content to Speak to Each Stage of the Consumer Journey

Great content isn’t created in one note. Rather, it should be a symphony of instruments! Each instrument should represent a different stage in the journey. In other words, develop content to speak to each stage of the consumer journey. The most successful brands use a dedicated team to place content across a variety of platforms, and approximately 39% of the organization’s overall budget goes toward these efforts. Dedicating the resources toward content marketing is the only way to build a killer content strategy!

3. Identify the Emotional Ties the Consumer Has to a Product

When developing any kind of content, always keep in mind that emotion trumps logic. Campaigns based on emotion perform twice as well as campaigns based purely on information. You may be surprised to learn that “character”-based presentations tend to outperform campaigns with high production value. Plus, people tend to share content that elicits emotional reactions. So, what does a soulful campaign with character look like? First, identify the emotional ties the consumer has to a product (with a study, poll, etc.), and incorporate it into your message.

4. Offer the Audience an Opportunity to Share

Next, make sure to lead with a human element, and provide the consumer with only one degree of separation. Finally, if it’s a social media campaign, offer the audience an opportunity to share their connection to the product. Ms. Petit-Frere shared the California’s Lottery approach to this method with their “Dream” campaign.

Here are some other examples of corporations that have incorporated these tips into their campaigns:

Coke Happiness Machine

Coke Join Hands 

We’ll leave you on that positive note! Stay tuned for Part II of our “Content is King” wrap-up, share we’ll outline the keys to successful content curation.

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