World Travel Market 2015 - How can content strategy help you to tell credible stories outside of your niche/vertical?
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Lots of brands struggle to venture outside their niche/vertical when planning and deploying their content strategy. But, if you can improve your brands story-telling you'll be able to increase your reach to a wider and more engaged audience. Stickyeyes Marketing Communications Director, Heather Healy, shared her insight and top tips for developing content streams that increase brand awareness, site visitors and partnerships options, without compromising on your brand values, at World Travel Market 2015.
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World Travel Market 2015 - How can content strategy help you to tell credible stories outside of your niche/vertical?
- 1. How can content strategy help you to tell credible stories outside of your niche/vertical? Heather Healy @heatherhealy @stickyeyes
- 2. The things I hope you’ll learn today 1. How to avoid creating content for the sake of it. 2.How to take the guesswork out of content creation. 3. It’s not too difficult to talk beyond your product or services. 4. Brand advocacy is tough for nearly everyone. 5. Commercial priorities don’t need to be forgotten.
- 3. Sticking to your niche. Problem 1.
- 4. This new brand positioning changes everything!
- 5. “We’ve flown 867 million miles this year!”
- 6. Say hi to Bonnie, our employee of the month!”
- 7. Say hi to Bonnie, our employee of the month!” “We’re having an office bake-off!”
- 9. The attention span of humans has fallen to eight seconds Microsoft, 2015
- 10. 73% of client side marketers are increasing their content marketing spend this year. Marketing Budgets Survey 2015
- 11. 19,947 digital marketing professionals in the UK Source: LinkedIn If they all produce a single piece of content a week…
- 12. (19,947x 73%)x 52= 727,188
- 13. Brands that have a genuinely interesting product set or service that customers will rave about non-stop are few and far between.
- 17. Going beyond talking about your brand, talking about travel is easy, right?
- 18. Wrong.
- 19. Talking about travel isn’t enough. Problem 2.
- 20. Travel is so easy to talk about! Endless content streams, locations, customer stories, why did I ever think I had a problem with content?! The Deluded Marketeer 2015
- 22. This video about the endangered wilderness of Guatemala changed my life!
- 23. The Solution
- 24. Make a start by following 3 simple steps
- 25. 1. figure out your audience
- 26. 2. Get to know them
- 27. 3. Find a happy middle ground.
- 28. Let me show you how we’ve done it.
- 29. 1. We start with with the audience. Find out who they are so we can ask them some questions.
- 30. Use all the tools at your disposal Hitwise GoogleAnalytics Market Research Competitor Data Mosaic Keyword Research
- 31. Get a good gauge for who your customer is.
- 32. 2. It isn’t enough to just know who they are. Find out what makes them tick to figure out what will work best.
- 33. Grab some data Global Web Index, Facebook Insights,YouGov, Hitwise, Mosaic,Your Customer Data
- 34. What can this data determine? Connecting data sources In-depth audience profiling Online behaviour Other insights to produce fully rounded audience insights. demographics, location, politics, professions, disposable income etc. Device usage, social network preference, time spent online etc. hobbies, activities, outlook on live, brand role preference, values etc. So what did it tell us?
- 35. Social platform usage. Which of the following services have you used or contributed to in the past month using any type of device?
- 36. Online activity. Which of the following have you done online in the past month on your PC/laptop?
- 37. Aconsistent, above average interest index for : Nature, Tennis, Country Walks, Staying Active and Healthy, Visiting New Places.
- 39. …and they believe that family is more important than a career.
- 40. Asking them outright works too.
- 41. Resonate with people who want to spend more time with their families Tie into their clearly defined hobbies Leverages video as a key content format Is distributed on the social platforms they’re using Meets X objective Meets Y objective Meets Z objective Ideation sense-check. We need content that will:
- 42. 3. We know who the audience are and what motivates them. But how can we make that work with our brand?
- 43. Hertz Together
- 44. The brand objective A way to bring our domestic to domestic locations to life without leaning on price promotion. The customer interest “I want more time with my family, in the great outdoors”
- 46. So what is it? It’s a rich resource that suggests the very best events and locations each country has to offer on a weekly and monthly basis. From festivals and events to stately homes and beaches. Supporting all of the Hertz locations across Europe.
- 47. How is this connected to what Hertz as a business are doing? • The Hertz Family Car Collection is tied to the campaign • The pick-up locations and surrounding events / locations are heavily linked and focused on the domestic keyword set • Engagement is further supported with appropriate ‘60 Sec Videos • Activity mirrors the Hertz marketing calendar with suggested locations and events to maximise reach • Tactical events and suggestions are seeded out outside of this calendar as further content • Grouping the locations and events as a way of filtering the suggestions allows for ongoing awareness activity
- 50. By reaching outside of our niche, we created content that the sites our customers visit, want to talk about too.
- 51. And we did it for the U.S. too.
- 53. City Swap
- 54. The brand objective How can we highlight the benefits of hiring a car in a major city? The customer interest “I like to be in the know, if there’s a cool new restaurant, I have to know first”
- 57. In 60 Seconds
- 58. The brand objective How can we create content to help our customers once they’ve booked with us? The customer interest “I’m organised. I don’t leave things to chance. I know the details of my trip before I go”
- 60. Wimbledon
- 61. The brand objective We want mass awareness at a place where we can reach business and leisure customers The customer interest “Wimbledon is the highlight of the sporting year for me”
- 63. We leverage Wimbledon as an opportunity every year to create useful content for the websites that influence our customers
- 64. ....and the results of all of this? Over Stickyeyes’ tenure, Hertz has seen significant improvements: Organic Traffic - up 178% Conversion Rates - up 48% An audience of over 100M
- 65. The things I hope you’ve learnt today 1. No-one cares about your bake-off 2. You don’t need to guess what content to create, your customers are clear on what they want, so use them to your advantage. 3. As long as there’s a clear link between your brand and what you’re talking about and what your customers want, you’ve found the middle ground. 4….even when it comes to Sponsorships 5. It’s not about renting a car. It’s where it takes you.
- 66. Download our free whitepaper ‘How to get serious with content’ http://insights.stickyeyes.com/how-to-get- serious-with-content-marketing Anyquestions? www.stickyeyes.com 01133912929 @heatherhealy @stickyeyes
Editor's Notes
- Hate to break it to you, but your customer probably doesn’t care about your brand. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but for most brands – to a customer, you’re a function, a service, something to be consumed. Getting people to go out of their way to consume content about you is tough, particularly if what you have to say is boring to the average consumer.
- Because you live and breathe the brand, it’s easy to talk about it. It’s easy to pull together data on how many millions of miles you’ve flown as an airline this year, or tell your customers about your employee of the month or who won the marketing team’s bake off. The problem is, your customer, really doesn’t care.
- To add insult to injury, your customer’s attention span is short, perhaps shorter than ever before Microsoft researchers surveyed 2,000 participants in Canada and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms. The results showed the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds. That’s poorer than your average goldfish. So you want to grab their attention in a crowded marketplace, when they’re barely listening – it’s a nightmare.
- Few brands are in the incredible fortunate (and enviable) position of having a genuinely interesting product set or service, that customers will rave about non-stop. (Hello, Apple.)
- Working with Hertz, we know that when people talk about our brand, they talk emotionally, not about the hiring of the car, but about what it facilitates
- The hire car isn’t a story. Hiring a car is functional, the car itself is probably similar to, or a slight step up from the car you have at home and also, most people who hire cars have very little interest in cars. The car, invariably, is boring. The hiring of the car, (whilst incredibly easy and great value for money!) is pretty boring.
- …but where it takes you isn’t boring. What it facilitates isn’t boring. Travel as a sector, isn’t boring!
- So of course, as a brand, you step beyond talking about the day-to-day runnings of your brand, your special offers and discounts, and you start to talk about travel, because talking about travel is so easy and creates so much engagement right? Wrong.
- You’re risking boring your customers again, or more accurately, being irrelevant if you just take a punt and talk about something to do with travel. Let’s say you decide to talk about where your brand operates.
- You might get lucky, you might be an airline that flies to Guatemala and you decide that instead of talking about how many sick bags you carry on board, you will talk to a local environmentalist about the endangered wilderness of Guatemala, film it and publish it on your YouTube channel.
- Your audience may go nuts for it. Or not. How do you know? You went all the way to Guatemala and you forgot to figure out if your audience care about endangered wildernesses. Turns out they don’t and you’ve wasted time and money trying to create a credible story outside of your comfort zone. Nice try, but still not quite good enough.
- Figure out who your audience is. It sounds so obvious but knowing who you're going after with your content marketing efforts is vital. If the very definition of moving outside of your niche is trying to expand into a new audience, then know who they are. You’ll probably have several audiences, that’s ok too, you can’t be all things to all people, but you can show different sides to your personality to different audiences.
- Get to know them. Are they massively prolific on Pinterest? No. Then that Pinterest content strategy seems a bit of a waste. Are they prolific video watchers? Nah. Then filming all of your brand content probably isn’t going to reach them. What else are they interested in? Are they massively into days out in the countryside, movie buffs or car enthusiasts? Knowing what they’re into, apart from being into you, stops you guessing at how to step outside of your niche.
- Find a happy middle ground between your brand and your customer Let’s say your audience over-index on their consumption of video. You know that video is typically expensive to produce, so you work on the second best option, or produce one brilliantly crafted video that year. Let’s say your audience over index on their love of Dad’s Army. There is no intersect between you, and Dad’s Army (as much as you might love there to be). You let that piece of information go as it doesn’t help you create relevant, credible content, but perhaps, it tells you a good time to schedule a TV advert...
- With Hertz, we know that their customers are split between business and leisure. Our leisure hirers are mostly hiring from within the country they live in, they’re families in a specific affluence bracket, we know where they live and we know the destinations they most commonly travel to.
- n.b. bloggers, I know there are tons of you here, the same completely applies to you. One of my personal favourite bloggers, Caroline Hirons, recently posed questions to her readers on the type of content they’d like to see more of. She included content that she already publishes – how to’s, product reviews, top 10’s, but also, included several other options such as book reviews and interviews – which she doesn’t do. Gauging what your audience likes the most of can be as simple as looking at your Analytics and seeing your most trafficked pages, but if you stick to what you know, how will you figure out if your audience would like (or even prefer) something else?
- We went back to those websites that our customers love, the journalists who write with pride about their cities and asked them to swap cities with another journalist from another publication within Europe and write about their experiences. The native of the city provided an itinerary of cool things to do and the novice went off to experience them and discovered plenty of new things along the way.
- We went back to those websites that our customers love, the journalists who write with pride about their cities and asked them to swap cities with another journalist from another publication within Europe and write about their experiences. The native of the city provided an itinerary of cool things to do and the novice went off to experience them and discovered plenty of new things along the way.
- Like a lot of brands, the opportunity to sponsor or partner with an event, team or brand that has huge media attention, is an opportunity to relish. We want to reach a lot of people and a big, global event is a great way to achieve that reach. We know our customers love Wimbledon. Our core customer profiles overindexed on their love of both tennis and the event itself, so it’s demographically a good fit for our brand.
- At Hertz, we’re in the fortunate positionn of being the official transport provider to Wimbledon. The partnership with Wimbledon is long standing and as Hertz’ digital agency, Stickyeyes have leveraged this opportunity to attract attention to Hertz. We essentially piggyback on the amazingness of Wimbledon and use it as a way to talk beyond travel.
- Over the past few years, we’ve created a Wimbledon reaction speed game, real-time on-the-court social updates guides to dressing for Wimbledon, a Wimbledon Bingo game and tons more. Sponsorship affords you the opportunity to go completely left field of your niche, as long as you’re sponsoring something that your customers are interested in. Intelligent selection of a partnership, however small or large, is critical to the success of using content in this way.