How to get traditional TV ad marketers to become content marketing converts?

A marketer from Farmers Insurance asked this question in a content marketing workshop. It ranks 61st among the Top 100 Questions on content marketing.

To create content marketing converts:

• Contrast content marketing and advertising.
• Address three key questions about buyer needs in your market.
• Share data on eroding ad performance and content marketing growth.
• A/B test advertising and content marketing.

People who don’t understand content marketing may not distinguish it from any old content. 

To create content marketing converts, draw the crucial distinction:

Content can be almost anything: a pixel, a line on a piece of paper, a sound.

But content marketing is much more, as the Content Marketing Institute defines it: “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.”

What’s important and different about content marketing? Its purpose. It attracts and retains a clearly defined audience – converting content consumers into subscribers, subscribers into customers, and customers into repeat customers.

Subscribers give you permission to continue marketing to them. Why? Because your content is valuable information that people want.

In contrast, advertising forces a message on people, whether or not they want it.

That said, Farmers Insurance ads stand out. They make me laugh.

In fact, Farmers’ ads are so good that they spread through social media. So the question is how to strike the right balance between TV ads and content marketing.

Contrast advertising and content marketing 

To create content marketing converts, stress 6 differences between ads and content marketing.

1. Brand-centric vs. customer centric: Advertising is all about the sponsor, the company, the brand, the product or service. In contrast, content marketing is about customer needs. The better you know customers, the easier it is to do.
2. Campaigns vs. ongoing commitment: Ad campaigns come and go in a matter of days, weeks or months. In contrast, early examples of content marketing have lasted more than a century. John Deere has published The Furrow since 1897, and Michelin has published the Michelin Guide since 1900.
3. Sales message vs. topics and answers: Advertising usually leads with selling. In contrast, content marketing leads with topics of interest to the tribe and answers to buyers’ questions. Ads are about advertisers, and content marketing is for people who belong to a certain audience or tribe.
4. Paid vs. paid/earned/owned: Advertising always appears in paid media. In contrast, content marketing appears in all forms of media – paid, earned and owned.
5. Interrupting vs. sought after: Since advertising chases consumers, it often interrupts people who are doing something else: watching TV, listening to radio, or reading a web page. In contrast, consumers seek out content marketing because it discusses topics they want to know about, educates and entertains them.
6. Self-serving vs. tribe serving: At the end of the day, advertising serves the advertiser. In contrast, content marketing serves a tribe of prospective buyers, by teaching them, building relationships and paving the way softly to a sale.

To dig deeper, here’s a blog about how advertising and content marketing are alike … and how they differ.

Address 3 key questions about your market

To create content marketing converts, now it’s time to ask 3 key questions about your market:

• What do customers in your market need most … to learn or to be sold? The higher the risk buyers take on, the more carefully they consider purchases in advance. Content marketing works best on carefully considered purchases – such as houses and retirement plans for consumers or infrastructure and capital facilities for businesses.
• What does a competitive audit reveal? Are competitors in your market investing more in content marketing, or advertising? A competitive content audit will show you what’s happening, either way. If a webpage exists to sell, it’s advertising. If a webpage exists to inform or entertain, it’s content marketing.
• Which web pages show better results … information or selling pages? Check the performance of pages on your website. Do more people use your information pages with content, or selling pages that push the product? If that answer is not clear today, do pilot tests to learn whether information or selling pages get more results over the next 12 months.

Acknowledge that ad viewership is eroding

Given changing consumer habits, how well is your advertising working these days?

To create content marketing converts, ask: who’s watching, not skipping, the ads?

Consumers are used to paying for streaming videos and music that are uninterrupted by advertising – for example, on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Spotify and Apple Music. That’s why people are even less tolerant of TV ads than they used to be.

An exception is live sports, which audiences are likelier to watch in real time.

Consider how people treat TV ads.

• Most people fast-forward through ads on time-shifted TV shows.
• As a result, networks increased ad content to 12 to 17 minutes per hour.
• Yet hours of TV watched per day continue to shrink, as this chart from Statista shows:

Online, people are skipping ads too.

• 90% of people skip the pre-roll ads on YouTube.
• 2 out of 3 people (65%) skip online video ads.
• 2 out of 5 people block website ads on their PCs, while only 1 out of 7 people block ads on their mobile devices.
• Due to banner blindness, website users ignore content that resembles ads, says Nielsen/Norman Group.

A/B test advertising and content marketing

The ultimate way to settle this debate is to make the case for a pilot project to test content marketing vs. TV advertising over 12 to 24 months. A fair test provides equal resources for each approach.

To create content marketing converts, the ultimate proof will be the results you get, whether they come from TV ads or content marketing.

A true believer in TV ads may not change his or her mind, based on the facts you present, no matter how compelling. 

When you’re arguing with a true believer, making an argument based on facts can backfire. Facts are necessary, but alone they may not be sufficient to change people’s worldviews.

It’s easy for people to convince themselves that accurate facts are wrong.

Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson found that when new facts run counter to a person’s worldview, the facts are rejected out of hand. If someone’s worldview is threatened, they see the facts as their enemy.

An A/B test provides objective evidence of how to strike the right balance between TV ads and content marketing.

“How to get traditional TV ad marketers to become content marketing converts?” is one of marketers’ Top 100 Questions about #contentmarketing. Here are the answers.