Ah, it happened again.
You launched a new product and created a robust content marketing strategy to support it. You rolled out dozens of blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts to attract new customers. But what you heard was nothing but silence and crickets chirping.
Content marketing is the cornerstone of effective digital marketing. But with so many brands utilizing the same old principles, the marketing atmosphere has become saturated.
All companies are using the same strategies and failing to deliver unique customer experiences. Creative content management can help you bridge this gap. It enables you to transition from traditional content marketing to innovative content management that engages, delights, and converts your customers.
So, what’s creative content management, and how can you implement it? Let’s find out.
What Is Creative Content Management?
If you haven’t heard about creative content management before, consider yourself lucky. Not a lot of brands know about it, let alone implement it. Everyone is abusing the web with blogs and videos that are all pretty much the same.
Think of the web as a bucket of water. And regular content – blog posts, videos, and articles – as black pebbles. All companies throw pebbles in the bucket for the consumers to choose from. When consumers look inside, they see nothing but a bucket full of black stones – all the same. There’s no way they can differentiate.
But when you implement creative content management, you throw a bright red ruby in the bucket. As people look inside, you stand out, shine bright, and catch all the attention.
So, what really is creative content management? In its most basic form, creative content management is a strategic approach to create and distribute unique, captivating, and customer-oriented content that compels the user to be a part of your brand.
Creative Content Management vs. Content Marketing
Now, how is it different from traditional content marketing? Well, since creative content management is a tweaked version of content marketing, many principles overlap. Many strategies and distribution channels remain the same.
However, the approach is different. In traditional content marketing, most brands focus on creating content that informs the consumers about how their product can make their lives better.
That’s a good approach, and it worked five years ago. But guess what, everyone’s doing it. All brands are flooding the web with informative, educational videos. We call it information overload.
And let’s face it – we never fancied school because we don’t like a lot of information and education. But on the other hand, we loved sports and art lessons because they engaged us. We felt like a part of them.
In creative content management, you offer art and sports lessons to your customers. You create content that’s not only informative but entertaining. It’s unique, something your consumers aren’t expecting or have seen before.
At its core, creative content management serves two purposes: two woo and to entertain your audience and, of course, to ensure consistent brand promotion that turns them into repeat customers.
Five Ways Creative Content Management Can Help Funnel in Customers
Creative content management means going beyond traditional blogging and YouTube videos. That doesn’t mean you should overlook blogging and other content marketing strategies.
Keep implementing them, but pair them with the following creative content management techniques to engage your customers and boost business growth.
1. Take it to the Streets: OOH Advertising
Although digital marketing is the heart of any marketing funnel, good old OOH advertisements can never get stale. Banners, posters, and billboards are still a colossal part of any marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes.
Out-of-home (OOH) or outdoor advertising is a marketing strategy that uses outdoor media to promote your brand. Billboards, lamp posts, bridge banners, POS displays, and guerrilla advertising are common types of OOH advertising.
The world is going digital. Every business, regardless of its type of industry, is going online. Therefore, effectively using OOH advertising strategies could give you a major edge over your competitors.
Unlike digital advertising techniques, OOH advertising is not trackable. You won’t be able to determine if any consumer has taken action. This makes OOH advertising a wild goose chase and many companies tend to avoid it.
However, you can eliminate this problem by utilizing QR codes. QR codes are a type of barcode, but they can integrate more information and are trackable. Brands can create a custom QR code and include it in their advertisements.
Along with the code, include a clear call to action. Ask the consumers to scan the code – to book an appointment, get a discount, visit your website, etc. Since QR code tracking is easy and accurate, you can determine how many people have taken action.
2. Podcasts
A podcast is an episodic series of audio content that users can stream online or download to their devices. You must’ve heard of popular podcast series like The Joe Rogan Experience, This American Life, and The Daily.
Podcasts are gaining popularity because they’re easy to consume, compared with reading text or watching videos. People can put on their headphones and listen to a podcast while exercising, meditating, cooking, traveling, etc.
21% of US adults listen to at least one podcast per month. Audio content is witnessing a massive surge at the moment, and podcasts help expand online reach for any business. And it’s easy to find a suitable podcast hosting platform.
Many brands have killed it with podcasts in the past. Slack, an online collaboration tool for remote teams, launched its podcast, the Slack Variety Pack, in 2015. The company understood its target audience very well – young, ambitious, and tech-savvy entrepreneurs. The podcast included 20-40-minute episodes talking about life, work, and everything in between.
The viewership of the podcast grew with nearly every episode. No surprises why Slack achieved the fastest business app growth in history.
3. User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) refers to the content – text, images, or videos – created and shared by your customers online.
Why is UGC so important? Because it boosts trust. According to the Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, 92% of customers trust organic, user-generated content more than traditional marketing. So, if utilized properly, UGC can:
- Enable content curation
- Boost social media reach
- Help generate unique content
- Help gain audience insights
- Increase personalization
All innovative brands are using UGC in some way or the other. Remember Netflix’s campaign for Stranger Things 2? Before the premiere, Netflix began promoting its fans’ posts on Instagram with the title of “Stranger Things 2” in the hashtag. Users grew curious and started sharing images and videos of stranger things from their lives.
The result? Netflix generated about 1 million audiences in two weeks. Stranger Things became one of the most popular shows on Netflix. And the company’s revenue surged.
Starbucks also came up with the #WhiteCupContest in 2014, encouraging its customers to draw artistic doodles on their cups and share them on Twitter. Within three weeks, the company received around 4,000 drawn cups. Starbucks’ YoY quarterly growth, which was flat during 2012-2014, increased in 2014-end and 2015.
Now, you don’t need to be Netflix or Starbucks to leverage UGC. By identifying the latest consumer trends, you can encourage your customers to share more content with your brand.
4. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is all the rage now. 80% of marketers find influencer marketing effective. Not just that, 71% of marketers cite that the quality of customers and traffic from influencer marketing is better than other marketing sources.
Influencer marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves collaborating with industry leaders and social media influencers to drive your brand’s message.
Let’s face it. Customers are more skeptical than ever. And they don’t really trust brands. For them, all companies are stereotypical advertisers trying to empty their wallets.
But they’d listen to someone they trust. If a message is coming out from a trusted figure, people are likely to take action. In fact, 74% of consumers agree that word-of-mouth marketing can influence their buying decision.
Brands have been leveraging influencer marketing for years. However, traditional influencer marketing revolved around celebrities and sports personalities with millions of followers. This has two drawbacks. First, the rates of celebrities are too high, and smaller businesses can’t afford them. Second, celebrities don’t have niche audiences.
You could be a car company and collaborate with Kylie Jenner to promote your new car. But do people follow Kylie for cars? Not really. You might get a massive reach, but you’ll hardly generate sales.
To overcome this hurdle, brands have moved to macro and micro-influencers. These people can have followers ranging from 1,000 to a million; however, they have niche audiences.
Take Aaron Marino, aka Alpha M, for example. The guy has more than 600k Instagram followers, but his audience is laser-focused. People follow him for fashion, fitness, and lifestyle tips. So, fashion and fitness brands can collaborate with Alpha M to reach targeted audiences.
Influencer marketing can boost your creative content management efforts. However, it’s essential to select the right influencers so that you can reach your target audience.
5. Case Studies
People don’t care what your product or service does. What they care about is how it can make their lives better. And what better way to tell that than showing how you’ve helped others like them?
About 83% of users trust recommendations from other people when compared to paid, branded advertising.
Sharing case studies and testimonials of your customers opens an opportunity to deliver positive results. Case studies are, in fact, a marketing staple. Brands can showcase their products and services with successful customer stories in an intuitive manner.
Case studies are important because they focus on the service from the customer’s perspective as opposed to forceful, paid promotions. A handful of brands often make the mistake of promoting themselves too much. Case studies are a great tool to divert the attention to customers and focus on the product instead.
A business can implement various types of case studies; blog posts, PDFs, videos, social media features, and videos for demonstrating successful customer stories.
To get a glimpse of how case studies work, research your market, read popular case studies such as Burberry, Ben & Jerrys, or Starbucks.
Creative Content Management: Jump on the Bandwagon Today!
The content marketing landscape is continually changing. Users have become smarter, and their attention span has plummeted. For brands, it means less time to attract and engage their audiences.
To overcome this hurdle, companies need to look past traditional content marketing strategies and come up with a more creative and innovative approach. Creative content management has, therefore, emerged as the new face of content marketing.
If implemented correctly, creative content management can help businesses engage their target audiences, provide them personalized experiences, and turn them into high-paying customers.