Content Marketing Revolution

What do Lego, Red Bull and the Four Seasons hotel chain all have in common? Well, they’re all really good at one thing: content marketing. These three companies enjoy powerful brand loyalty and extensive customer engagement as a result of their pioneering content marketing strategies.

Content marketing is all about using interesting, relevant and remarkable content to create a deeper relationship between a brand and its customers. Being a nuanced and innovative approach to marketing, content marketing requires a little bit of preparation; in other words, you’ve got to do your homework before putting your content out into the world!

The first thing you’ll need to investigate is what your target group of customers is talking about. You can start by researching trending topics among your brand’s current and prospective customers, and learning about the experts, commentators and competitors in your industry. Hootsuite is one of many social media tools that makes this research a little easier, while Google Trends enables you to follow rapidly shifting trends in your target group with excellent precision.

After your research, it’s time to look inward and investigate the content already available within your company. You may for example find interesting reports or analyses that have only been published internally so far. Create an inventory to collect and keep track of the content that you find. You could start by creating an Excel spreadsheet to record content, making note of its format, whether it’s published or not and the person responsible for it.

Take this opportunity to get rid of poorly written, irrelevant or outdated content that isn’t fit to represent your company. If you’re unsure whether something deserves to be canned, ask yourself: is this piece of content how you want your company to be seen by a potential customer? If not, let it go.