advertising

Turn Viewers Into Customers Through Content Marketing

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Why should your business consider a content strategy? Content marketing is quite time-consuming to produce and requires rigorous research. After all, it generally consists of informational and/or entertaining pieces aimed at turning viewers into customers without explicitly saying that. These pieces can include videos, blog posts, graphics, photo series, recipes, apps, or other useful online tools. The term is broad, allowing you to utilize your creativity in so many ways. They might be challenging, so are they worth it?

Absolutely! Content marketing produces more leads, drives a ton of brand awareness, and increases ROI. Plenty of CMOs are optimistic about it, as 78% see content marketing as the future of marketing. 90% of brands use it now, so don’t get left behind.

Producing great, effective, engaging content isn’t just about the numbers, it’s about the emotional connections made with your brand. First of all, it’s a great way to get past ad blockers and the people who use them. Few people actively seek out ads. If you’re making content similar to what people actively seek out, then that’s not what ad blockers are going for. Content pieces are considered too valuable for that. A little over half of traditional ads on Google aren’t even seen, prompting companies to turn to content instead. Traditional ads tend to be one-sided, while content marketing aims to make a genuine connection with you and making a small but positive impact on your day. 

Another solid reason to utilize content marketing is to have a convenient route to consistently publishing new, fresh media to remind everyone of your existence. There are only so many ways to photograph your products for social media and ways to talk about its benefits. Even if making consistent social media and ad content is doable, it can get difficult to find new ways to promote the same few things. Instead of discussing what goes in your product and why it’s awesome, your content could tell the stories of your consumers or be tutorials on things that include your product’s use.

Content can open up more avenues to show your brand’s creativity. If you don’t think you’re the most artistic, aim to be educational. For example, Hubspot provides plenty of free educational resources, such as webinars or video courses, with no obligation to use its products. These resources have been extremely valuable for aspiring marketers looking for a career switch. You’ll find them linked all over the web under “how do I learn more about marketing?” threads. 

Even though the core of a content marketing piece isn’t “buy now”, it’s a meaningful building block in your brand. Your value indirectly gives viewers more of a reason to buy from you. After all, your videos could have made them laugh or your blog posts answered the questions they were desperately Googling. To achieve this status, you really have to understand your audience deeply. You have to understand your company’s brand beyond the surface, beyond the price and physical functions. What problems will your product be solving or at least helping with? Where and when will your products be used? Those are some questions you can start with.

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For example, Shutterstock (pictured above) users would probably be interested in media trends. That’s why every year, the site produces interactive, animated reports on what users are searching for.

Entertainment that features your product use

You can answer those questions in an entertaining way that attracts viewers who have never heard of you. Your content could be videos that show what happens when you use their products, following the steps of camera company GoPro with their YouTube channel. The channel, which currently has 8.37 million subscribers, shows what it’s like to go on trips skiing, surfing, and biking all over the world. How does this market the product? To be able to film these adrenaline-surging activities, you need a camera that can attach to your body, like the GoPro. There’s no way you’re holding your phone out while surfing! 

Even if someone isn’t currently looking to buy a camera, it’s likely they’d stumble upon one of GoPro’s hundreds of videos if they were to search for something like “Galapagos surfing”.  Someone looking to learn more about outdoorsy, extreme sports would find the channel entertaining whether they needed a GoPro or not.

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Help answer Googled questions in detail 

If you’re looking to go down the problem-solving route and feel creatively exhausted, tutorials are a great idea. Some brands make tutorials for common activities, showing their product being used to achieve the end result. Beauty retailer Sephora often publishes short makeup tutorials on its YouTube channel featuring looks a lot of makeup users are looking for, such as a makeup look for a job interview. These include tutorials for newbies who are just looking to start using makeup. 

Your educational content can be short or long. Some brands even make entire in-person or online workshops or even courses! Hipster favorite Intelligentsia Coffee has a series of coffee-related educational articles and programs centered on showing coffee drinkers how to brew coffee and teaching them how coffee is harvested. It even has a mobile app complete with timers and instructions for the hardcore! This is a great way for coffee enthusiasts to discover Intelligentsia and for current customers to keep coming back should they ever need those resources.

Provide new, unique, insightful discoveries

This one’s slightly different from the above in that we’re talking about information that isn’t well known, but makes quite an impact when let known. These aren’t data points that would be commonly Googled, but catch the eye when scrolling. 

Fitness coach and influencer Cassey Ho, known as Blogilates, has made some informational videos on the data of top female Instagrammers overall and in the fitness realm. In the videos, she discusses her findings such as average hair color, skin tone, and age of the influencers. 

This type of content is a great idea if you’ve got a curious audience open to learning new things.

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Blogilates Youtube

Be wholesome and create positive social impact

With social activism being especially widespread in 2020, many brands have used their platforms to create touching, emotionally provocative content promoting wholesome values. Aside from makeup tutorials and other content about their products, Sephora also publishes videos of some of its employees promoting diversity, equality, and inclusion and celebrating diverse backgrounds. 

This kind of storytelling, often autobiographical content can help humanize a brand and help inspire its audience. It can also help showcase values you want your brand to be associated with, which helps with customer attraction and retention: consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand with a mission they support.

Improve your search engine optimization (SEO)

All these types of content creation work to slowly build your brand’s image and reputation, leading to deeper and more meaningful connections with your customers and viewers. Part of why these deeper relationships lead to improved ROI is through SEO. How? One of the biggest contributors to search engine optimization is link building, which means gaining as many links to your website as possible. This signals credibility and popularity to the search engines. 

If your content is valuable enough, people will want to genuinely share it. Many of those people could be bloggers and journalists with thousands or more viewers on their articles. If they find your work worth sharing, that’s another link to you. The more notable your work is, the more links you’ll get. If you can go as far as being linked to from more prestigious, well-known blogs or even press, that’ll make a tremendous impact on your ranking. This seriously beats contracting and paying link building agencies or even worse, spamming your site on the comments section of multiple blogs and articles. 

Even before your content gets shared, you’ll be feeling the effects of SEO. Content gives you more opportunities to use keywords, another important component of SEO. However, the keywords can’t just be placed anywhere at any time. It has to be done strategically, so it would be ideal for your content marketing strategists, especially the copywriters, to understand rudimentary SEO principles. For example, excessive keyword use is known as keyword stuffing and can negatively affect your rankings. Not only will it hurt your rankings, it’s also unpleasant for visitors to read.

Content marketing is a broad term and can encompass so many avenues to explore your creativity and knowledge. It’s a fulfilling, organic way to get your brand out there through ways more practically useful than traditional advertising. 

Drop us a line when you’re ready to create some content of your own. We’re looking forward to creating the next viral video, a useful infographic, or promoting a wholesome social cause!

Best,

Irose Team

How Influencer Marketing Created Billion Dollar Brands

Reposted from Revolve

Reposted from Revolve

As technology advances, traditional advertising is finding more obstacles before it can reach its intended audience. For example, you’ve probably used ad blockers before on the computer. You probably think a pro of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are the lack of commercials. Even the “skip intro” button on Netflix was praised! 

Fortunately, the rise of social media influencers is also paving a path for a non-intrusive form of marketing: using the influencers as ambassadors.

Research shows that our youngest counterparts, Generation Z, prefer endorsements from their favorite influencers over traditional advertising. It’s not just them either: many people are more inclined to buy a product after they discovered it through a social media influencer. 40% of people have purchased a product after seeing it used by an influencer. Think of it this way: if an individual you admire is wearing something from a particular brand, it makes the brand look more appealing by association. 

Trust is another reason why influencer marketing is so important. Influencers have already built relationships with their followers, making them a trusted source of information. If you were finally able to lose that last 30 pounds with your favorite influencer’s diet plan, chances are you’ll believe them when they tell you how effective and awesome a certain protein bar brand is. Think of them as thought leaders in particular niches passing along messages that they’ve deemed worthy. Influencers can also be viewed as peers, which also increase trust. In fact, a study by Edelman found that 77% of consumers state that peer reviews are either deal-breakers or deciding factors in their purchasing decisions. 72% of customers trust a business more when it’s recommended by an influencer.

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Daniela Braga x Givenchy

Case Studies

Some successful brands have attained their status through both micro and macro influencer marketing, such as Daniel Wellington. In four years, the $15000 company became a $220 million company and was Europe’s fastest-growing company between 2013 to 2015. Much of this success was due to how much it took advantage of influencer marketing in a time when it wasn’t as common and competitive as it is today. Influencers were offered free watches in exchange for posting about them, and their ROI was tracked through discount codes unique to each influencer. This marketing also gave the brand plenty of user-generated content to post on its social media, giving it a more authentic feel. Financially, it ended up spending a lot less than if it had used traditional advertising.

Another great example of success through influencer marketing is the clothing brand Revolve. Starting off with $50k and now worth $1.5 billion, Revolve launched into fame by being featured on the pages of fashion’s most followed influencers, such as Chriselle LimChiara Ferragni, and Aimee Song. In fact, 70% of Revolve’s sales can be traced back to an influencer. They build relationships with these influencers not just through strategizing social media posts but also experiential trips, such as inviting popular bloggers and celebrities to a weekend in the Hamptons

Revolve realized that most of their target demographic, millennials, spent much of their free time on mobile and were located all over the world. Influencers became the vehicle to reach a global audience. According to their Chief Brand Officer Raissa Gerona, “Working with influencers has been key to our business and using them and their power to influence people all over the world... we can see that because 45% of the people that follow us don't even live in the U.S. We've created this global fan base, and it's been through influencer marketing.”

Traditional Advertising VS. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has a higher ROI than other forms of marketing. Having an elegant ad in the glossy pages of Vogue may make you feel prestigious, but it comes at a $200k+ price tag. Time and Inc will charge at least $100k.  And advertising on a billboard in Times Square costs a whopping $1-4M.

Instead, you could take that same amount to several influencers who can showcase your product among their aesthetic, carefully-curated Instagram feeds. And depending on the influencer chosen, a campaign can cost about $7k-$10k for an influencer with 1M followers. This is a fraction of the price of advertising in a magazine or billboard while still ensuring high traffic. Working with influencers can allow you to target a specific audience and reach your desired demographic directly. 

What to watch out for

Unlike Google Ads, influencers, and celebrities are human beings. Because of this, there are different dangers to watch out for than with other forms of digital advertising. Human beings make mistakes, ranging from accidentally copying and pasting the wrong text in their promotional posts like Scott Disick to deliberately saying bigoted things. For example, in 2018, several brands cut ties with beauty influencer Laura Lee after discovering severely racist tweets against blacks and Asians in her past. So before you decide to partner with an influencer, do a bit of a background check. 

An influencer’s reputation, whether positive or negative, will affect yours. This was especially notable in Nike’s partnership with Colin Kaepernick. It seems like partnering with someone who bravely stood against racial injustice helped it increase its sales by 31% in the days after he was featured in an ad. 

There’s also the risk of inadvertently treating influencers like commodities, reducing them down to their physical features and numbers. Even if their following count is important, you can’t forget the human behind them. Remember, you’re trying to build a genuine relationship, not just throwing products at something. 

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Victoria Justice and Madison Reed x Daniel Wellington

The rise of influencer marketing doesn’t mean that other forms of digital marketing should be ignored. Experiential activations, content strategy, and social media marketing such as Facebook and Instagram ads are all important avenues to hit to stay modern.

How much do all these forms of marketing cost? What combination of influencer and traditional marketing is financially best for you? Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we’ll be breaking down the prices of both!

Best,

Irose Team