Creating meaningful content

It’s difficult to go onto any marketing site without seeing the phrase “meaningful content”.  It’s hard to imagine much of a demand for pointless content, so why the focus?  Content has always been meaningful as far the product goes, but has often failed to connect with the right audience which is where it stopped being meaningful.

It’s not really a revolution to focus on meaningful content, but what has changed dramatically with digital marketing is a marketer's ability to identify and target a very specific audience.  

For those reading this that don’t work in marketing, there’s essentially 2 steams of marketing; outbound and inbound.

Outbound is what we’ve always had.  TV adverts, radio, billboards, paper ads.  It’s a scatter gun approach where anyone could see the advert and the product in question may not be of interest or relevance to the audience.  You need a very wide net to be successful with outbound marketing as you have to reach multiple demographics at different times simply to even have a chance of connecting a relevant audience.

Inbound marketing however targets products against an audience with an already established need or interest, and it’s in this area where marketers can genuinely create meaningful content. Through analysing consumer behaviour and history, they can pinpoint not only who they want to market to but how they want to do it.  Using different content for the same product based on age, wealth, gender and a myriad of other things increases the rate of converting that prospective customer exponentially.  It is however not all that easy, otherwise everyone would doing it with a high level of success.  And they’re not.

Good content marketing may not even mention the product.  If you focus on what’s important to the customer rather than trying to force your product on them, you’re then creating trust in your brand which most likely endure and has a greater probability of reaching the often illusive section of the marketing funnel, advocacy.

It’s odd, but when you look at marketing funnels they’re almost always slightly different, many stopping at purchase.  If you’re actually looking at Customer Lifetime Value however,  the lower funnel marketing is where the big bucks are.  Retargeting those customers with meaningful content will work, which is why I like the above model best.

Savvy consumers know when they’re being sold to, and trust takes time to build.  This means that every interaction with a customer cannot be carried out with the sole intent of selling them something, even if ultimately that’s what you’d like to do.

One of the greatest examples of brilliant content marketing is the tractor manufacturer John Deere.  In 1895 they started a magazine for farmers called The Furrow and it’s still running to this day.  It’s full of articles about how to harvest crops better, ways to improve irrigation and general agricultural news.  Hardly a mention of the brand.  How do you think those farmers in 1895 reacted though?  Fast forward 122 years and John Deere are the biggest and most respected brand in the business, so I’d say they got it just right.

If marketers focus on enhancing the quality of a consumer experience no matter what field it might be in (pardon the pun), provide a product that enables that improvement, can identify and market that product to the audience that uses that it and then engage with them and provide content that is specific to their personal circumstances, well, it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t be successful.