Content marketing is not only the future of advertising, but it is thriving in the current online climate. Brighton Journal have developed a guide on how you can leapfrog your business competitors. Connecting with your target market in a way that is direct, digital and discreet.Â
Technological development arising in the millennium has created a major online marketing platform for brands on an international scale. Gone are the time-consuming days of ‘word of mouth’, as data now travels across the globe within seconds. This provides the ultimate advertising foundations to elevate your business.
However, along with the new age of super-speed technology also comes consumers who are actively able to avoid advertising. It has never been easier to fast-forward ad breaks on the TV, pay to upgrade your app to ‘ad-free’, or to simply avoid clicking on obvious banner ads. This is evident with ‘Generation Z’, born into a technological age, but thrive off their hypothetical built-in ad-block.
The problem with GDPR
Arguably, to blame for this mass reluctance to engage in adverts is the General Data Protection Regulation Act (GDPR). Implemented by the UK Government in 2018, it promises to safeguard Internet consumers from harmful data breaches. The GDPR follows strict principles that pledge to keep personal information private. Online organisations are now legally required to offer consumers an ‘opt-in’ option.
However, online profiling that predicts our internet behaviour or interests is still manifesting its way into adverts. Have you ever been in a situation where you may be looking up cheap flights abroad and then, as if by magic, a budget airline sale advertisement appears in your Facebook news feed? These ‘coincidental’ online occurrences have made consumers far more wary of what they engage in. In short, people simply do not enjoy clicking on ads.
So if people aren’t engaging with this kind of online marketplace, there must be a way to promote your content in a way that doesn’t entail the creation of a clickable advert. The answer lies in content marketing. A technique all the most successful social media stars, bloggers and businesses use on a daily basis. It is designed to breakthrough the conventional mode of promotional enterprise.
What is Content Marketing?
In short, content marketing is the new wave of advertising. If you use social media, you are unknowingly contributing to a type of marketing with every like, click and share you make.
The Content Marketing Institute, defines content marketing as such:
“a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
The important thing to note here is that content marketing has little to do with your brand, product, or services. It has everything to do with your audience. Furthermore, highly notable are the terms “valuable, relevant, and consistent content” which are what most standard adverts explicitly lack. This is because they give consumers such little space for direct engagement that urges them to think, to question, and to enjoy the content presented. Content marketing disguises promotional content within storytelling, videos, podcasts, and other engaging platforms for creative content production.
According to global statistics provided by market data collectors Statista there are over 4 billion active internet users. Nearly 3.4 billion of these are active social media users.
In a global climate where such a huge proportion of the world is online – can you really afford not to be?
How Brighton inspired blog posts can drive your sales through storytelling
According to global media company Forbes, the easiest way to begin content marketing is by blogging. It allows for creativity to disguise a true business incentive. This allows content to reach a wider target audience, who are far more attracted to the art of storytelling, rather than a compulsive need to avoid ad-clicking. Blogging can help to avoid the trap of creating content for the wrong people, as often seen in social media posts – because it can easily be tailored to represent focused, valuable and relevant information.
Storytelling through blogs in particular, is a valuable way of engaging with an audience. It is often easier to resonate ideas through words than it is through a single advert. Furthermore, “stories are continuous. Opportunities for engagement are always on. Customers do not go on/off based on your campaign or content calendar.” Blogs have the capacity to be shared on social media, to be liked and commented on, expanding their reachability to connect with people via creative means.
Help with keeping your audience engaged
High profile stars are frequently sponsored to promote products on their social media accounts. This is often done by “telling a story” of how miraculous a beauty product is, or how life-changing a new brand of denim is to their body shape. Content marketing allows advertising to be disguised as something else. Yet this shape-shifting form of business promotion can often cause marketers to lose sight of exactly who their audience is. Focus drifts to network growth and post reachability instead of relevant distribution of product knowledge.
Creating suitable content marketing may be something you struggle with, due to time, or perhaps financial constraints. In this instance, a copyrwriter can assist you. A copywriter is qualified to create professional standard text that increases brand awareness, whilst persuading readers to take action.
The key to online success is having a large reachability. This is how many people have engaged with your content across all forms of social media. If you do not have a large social media following, using a copywriting company, like Brighton Journal to write and share your work is vital. This way, your company can excel against its competitors, and make its way to success.
Featured image credit: LyncConf Games
