The key to content marketing is to pay attention to your audience. Create (or find) content that is relative to your brand and reinforces you as the industry expert. Tell a story, teach a skill, or show a heartwarming picture. Though content marketing doesn’t directly say “here we are and we’re selling this product,” it shows your audience that you are a trusted, knowledgeable source of information, which can pay-off in the long run.
Why Content Marketing Rules Over Banner Ads
Scenario 1: You’ve logged into Facebook and tried to bring up your chat bar, only to run into yet another banner advertisement. Ugh. Just an inconvenience of using the social network.
Scenario 2: You’ve logged into Facebook, and you see an enticing newsfeed: “5 Tips for Grilling Better Burgers.” Do you like to grill? Do you have time to read five short tips? Before you know it, you’ve opened the article and started reading about marinades, spices, and charcoal variants.
Which of these scenarios is more likely to turn you into a customer? According to companies, such as Kraft, they are four times as likely to see a return on their investment (ROI) by implementing content marketing rather than using traditional banner advertisements. Let’s throw some definitions at you:
Content Marketing: The creation and distribution of content that is relevant and valuable to a company and its target audience.
Banner Advertisements: An image block placed on a website designed to drive traffic to a point of purchase, call to action, or other landing page.
Back to the Kraft example, the company reports that it generates “the equivalent of 1.1 billion ad impressions a year,” and a “four-times-better” ROI from content marketing rather than traditional advertising. In fact, Julie Fleischer, Kraft’s director of data, content, and media, was named the 2014 “Content Marketer of the Year” by the Content Marketing Institute. So Kraft probably knows what they’re doing.
Furthermore, if you enlist brand advocates to share your message, your company will gain even more exposure. SocialToaster’s SuperFan statistics reveal that when a fan advocate shares the same message as a banner ad, the advocate’s message sees a 245% lift in reach and visibility compared to the company running a banner advertisement.
The key to content marketing is to pay attention to your audience. Create (or find) content that is relative to your brand and reinforces you as the industry expert. Tell a story, teach a skill, or show a heartwarming picture. Though content marketing doesn’t directly say “here we are and we’re selling this product,” it shows your audience that you are a trusted, knowledgeable source of information, which can pay-off in the long run.
At SocialToaster, we cultivate your brand’s existing online following into an eager fan advocate base to take advantage of native advertising’s benefits. For more information about how SocialToaster can turn your biggest fans into SuperFans, learn about how our platform works or request a demo today!
