Getting more from your content

Content is a must-have digital marketing tool, but as with all components in the marketing machine, there’s a right and wrong way to go about producing it.

How, then, do organisations generate the best possible ROI from their digital content? By following these three rules:

Rule 1: Content isn’t any less important

Content might not feel as important as, say, investing in a big new technology, or spending millions on a brand refresh or TV commercial, but without content the other components of a digital campaign may as well not exist – because content is the window to the brand.

Companies should always consider their digital content at the outset of any campaign – giving it the same forethought and care as every other component. When content is fully integrated into the wider campaign it can be used in an extraordinarily strategic manner, capturing attention, nurturing leads, and driving action.

Winning Example: Casper Sleep Channel

This 2019 campaign from the US mattress maker was a great example of the integration between content and brand. Each week from April-May 2019 Casper released a new piece of meditative audio to help its customers sleep, using the channels Spotify, IGTV and YouTube. It then promoted these with teasers via its other social platforms.

Why it worked

Casper understood its audience, its product, and how it could positively associate the two. Each positive association lifted the brand’s presence, and its trustworthiness in the minds of users.

Rule 2: Don’t produce just anything

Organisations shouldn’t produce any old content, but rather content that is fit for their brand and audience. Of course, every brand is different, but overall ‘good’ content has three key traits:

1. It’s smart – uniquely tailored to its audience based on their data (demographic, interests, pain points, etc.).
2. It’s valuable – it doesn’t waste their time. It presents a high degree of insight or entertainment, depending on which is appropriate.
3. It’s quality – ‘good’ content is actually good, as redundant as that may seem to say. It covers its basics, such as grammar, spelling and formatting, and is easy to handle from a user experience perspective – loads quickly and works smoothly, regardless of device.

High quality content will generally always out-perform poorly made content because it’s on-brand, on-target and inherently clickable.

Case study: Colgate

Colgate may not produce the most exciting content, but the company knows its audience and their needs, and has perfectly catered to both. Its Oral Care Center is packed with informative content on dental hygiene (a search for ‘gum disease’ alone yields over 2,000 results), from the causes of bad breath to the treatment options for temporomandibular disorder, all designed in an easy-to-navigate content hub.

Why it worked

Health and hygiene can be anxiety-inducing subjects for many, and the internet is riddled with misinformation and untrustworthiness. Colgate users know, however, that for all their research needs they can go to one, authoritative place – Colgate’s own website.

Rule 3: Let your content fly

The key to effective content promotion is forethought. Content is capable of taking people on a journey from an emotional message to the actual product – and a well thought out content strategy is the best way to achieve this.

Using smart audience targeting, an organisation can show off its best content to the right people, in the right place, at the right time. It can break its users down into different segments to tailor them a more personalised experience, and it can integrate different arms of content to produce a complete, multi-platform experience – bringing together those big-budget TVCs with articles, social media, AR, podcasts, webinars, email nurtures, billboards…whatever it takes to get the word, and excitement, out.

Winning Example: LG Laundry Museum

This is one of the best examples of integrating different arms of content into a wide-reaching social campaign. LG pulled together short- and long-form video with Facebook Messenger, AR and user-generated content to draw global attention to its latest product, the LG TwinWash.

Why it worked

Users’ attention was captured with short videos about ‘ruined laundry’, then brought into a journey where they could submit their own stories to a Facebook chatbot, view an LG TwinWash in their home via AR, and discuss laundry disasters online with other users via Facebook. In one campaign, LG was able to build huge amounts of conversation around its new product, reaching a global audience in the process.

In a nutshell – to get the best ROI from digital content, it must never be an afterthought. Content will deliver results, but it’s at its best when backed with data and integrated into an organisation’s wider digital marketing matrix.