A course on Content marketing

A course on Content Marketing
By
Rohit Kumar
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai

Introduction to the tutorial
Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing
relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and
understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
The course explains how content marketing can be used to your advantage and
promote your business.
It will primarily help all the readers who are into advertising or the ones who aspire
to make a career in Digital Marketing.
B2B/B2C businesses to reach out to their customers
Prerequisites: A good understanding of the fundamental concepts of marketing,
advertising and analyzing products & audience.
Who shall take up the course?

Agenda
III
Examples,
Conclusion
& Further
References
II
Content types
& Tools
I
Definition & the
process of
content
creation

I
Definition & The Process Of Content
Creation

Introduction
 Cold Calling
 Cold Emails (SPAM)
 Interruptive Ads
 Marketer -Centric
 SEO
 Blogging
 Attraction
 Customer -Centric

Overview of Content Marketing & Its Uses
Also known as inbound marketing, corporate journalism, branded media,
native advertising and customer publishing.
However, the basic idea remains the same, i.e., to create and distribute
content that engages and attracts a targeted audience, while encouraging
them to take action which is profitable to a business.
It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing
strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it.
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your
customers and prospects without selling.

It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or
services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more
intelligent.
The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses,
deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately
reward us with their business and loyalty.

Use of Content Marketing
 The growth of the WWW, social networks, and mobile technologies has changed the
relationship between consumers and businesses.
 Consumers research on Google to compare similar products, read the product’s
review, and even ask their friends on social networks, before buying a product.
 Hence, businesses need to rethink their traditional marketing strategies and
channels if they want to earn the trust of their customers and influence their buying
decisions.
 This is where content marketing plays an important role. It helps businesses to
attract potential consumers’ attention towards their products by highlighting and
promoting their key features.

The processes you put in place to manage your content marketing will be unique. Your story is (or should be)
unique, and so too will be your method for telling it.
Process of creating a content marketing campaign
Identify target
audience &
set objectives
Create
content
Publish
content
through tools
Promote
through
media
Track the
success

Targeting Customer
 Before targeting, you need to identify our customers based on our business objectives.
 Identifying your target audience is not so difficult, but the challenge lies in digging up their pain areas.
 Time has changed from being seller to solution provider.
 Once identified the problems of the consumers and understand their requirements, you would be able
to come up with tailored solutions to cater to those particular requirements.
 But after identifying the pain areas, you need to verify that you have penned down the real problems
of your customers and are not imaginary or mere assumptions.
 For that, you need to know more about your customer.
 When you want to create a content marketing strategy, finding out about your audiences and their
needs is the most important task.

Targeting Customer - Steps
• List your customers based on names or identities
• Ex: For a tourism company, Experienced-occasional, Local-National-
International. Similarly for a FMCG company ABC methodology
List Your Primary
Customers
• Primary & secondary research and Survey forms filled by the customers
• Customer care call records, information from sales team
• Feedback forms, Social media page/handle
Collect Information
about them
• Learning about customer experience
• Learning about customer knowledge level and personality
• A holistic information may be able to cater to wide range of customer
Identify their
characteristics
• Semi-fictional representations of ideal customer based on real data
• Some select educated speculation about customer demographics,
behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
Create Personas

Targeting Customer- Creating Personas
Buyer personas must
be based off of the
actual research & not
assumptions
Background,
Identifiers,
Demographics,
Goals,
Challenges,
How We Help,
Common Objections,
Real Quotes.
Awareness stage
Consideration Stage
Decision Stage
Conducting Persona research Interview current customers. Use the Buyer’s Journey.

Targeting Customer- Creating Personas

Creating Contents
People look for trustworthy source of information rather then just sellers.
Marketers have often iterated that it’s the company that tells a better story wins and
not the company which is bigger in size.
Online media, which have empowered consumers like never before.
To tell a better story, we need to answer 3Ws – who, what and why.
• How do you tell a better story – Medium (Posters, billboard or television
advertisement)
• Which factor will give you more business and more revenue?

Creating Contents
Why are you creating the content?
 Why do you want to create a specific type of content?
 What Goal do you want to achieve out of this?
 Is the content strategy aligned to your overall business goals?
Who are the customers that you want to target?
 Identifying your customers is the most important step in content marketing
 The bottom line is to list out the problems and preferences of your audience and figure out their taste
 “What is the unique value proposition that you have to offer to you customers”
What is the goal you want to achieve from the created content?
 How will your content help your customers? How will it impact their lives?
 For example: It is meant to assist them for their travel, house, special occasion, examination and so on.

Media Platform
Content here could be
feature stories, product
announcements, product
details, or information on
specific issue.
Now you need to decide the platform in order to market your content
It is another important part owing to highly diversified customer segments.
This defines the nature of the content you create
For example:
The content here could be
image, status, message
weblink.
The content here could be
image, and few links.

Media Platform
There are three major strategies that you must consider while defining your media channel
Situation Analysis
 Existing channels if any and the need for the new one
 Will blogging be helpful enough to convey our story?
Channel objective
 Depending on the story you want to tell and your goals, you might decide to create a blog/ Facebook page
 So your channel’s primary objective in the case of a blog is to get more subscribers to your blog, which will
generate leads for your sales and in case of Facebook it is to spread awareness and get it shared more.
Creating content plan for the channel
 What incentives do we want to offer to the subscribers considering their personas.
 For example: clubbing blog posts into e-books that me be a guide to new subscribers.
Customer information and business story along with budget and bandwidth that we want to achieve decide this.

Scheduling of the Content
Content marketing strategy is a long term, continuous process
So you need to schedule which content need to be released at
what time.
Ex: For a travel website
• List of the kinds of content you have or need to create and
the dates when they will be created and published
• All the details about the particular content should be
maintained.
• Which media channel will be targeted and at what time.
• Metadata such as your primary target audience, SEO
keywords, call to action etc.
 Google Excel sheets can be used to accomplish this.

Standardization of the content
 No one prefers haphazard contents, there should be continuity.
 Maintain a user guide for all the stakeholders.
 This style guide will be a documentation of set of rules and procedures for
the content creation.
 Example: The colors of your brand, font style and size, the key phrases you
use for call to action buttons to the spelling and punctuation usages,
everything is documented and standardized by a style guide.
 Style guide is a necessary document for the success of the content
marketing strategy & to maintain quality of the content across website.
 A style guide can list step-by-step rules for both Designer’s as well as
content writer along with legal compliance.

Methods and Resources to Create Content
 We need tools to create, manage &
optimize our content.
 Content Marketing tools come in
different shapes and sizes.
 Application is dependent on your
business requirements and the scope
of your content marketing strategy.

 As the name suggest, this tool helps in publishing all kind of contents.
 Also known as content management tools.
 Create a website, build your blog and send emails to your subscribers
 Free: Wordpress, blogspot and Drupal ; Paid: Sitecore and Tridion
Conversion & Data capture tool
 Allow you to build online registration forms and surveys for your key
landing pages.
 They capture data of customers visiting these landing pages, which can be
integrated with sales tools like Salesforce.com.
 For Example: Wufoo, Eloqua, Manticore, etc.
Content Creation & Publishing Tool

 These tools help you to deliver specific content to targeted customers.
 As one visits to your website & identify themselves, the tool push relevant
content to the user.
 Example: e-commerce/travel websites shows relevant information after login.
 For example: Google Website Optimizer, Adobe Omniture, Autonomy Optimost
etc.
Content Optimization
 These tools manage and track the content for your social channels such as
Facebook and Twitter.
 One of the most frequently used tools is Hootsuite, which allows you to
centrally schedule your social media posts. Tweetdeck for Twitter.
 For better analysis, you can grab tools like Radian6 and Sysomos.
Social Media Management & Listening tools

Limitations
You have to constantly make efforts to resonate with your audience without misleading them.
For this you need to define your target audience and define your media channels & build
editorial style guides.
Even after enormous efforts from us, several challenges still exist in the space.
1. Getting engagement
 ‘We want more visits, more shares and more comments’.
 69% of marketers say they are creating more content now than they did a year ago.
 High competition leading to scarcity of exceptionable ideas and concepts
2. Creating useful content consistently
 Lack of such resources

Limitations
3. Keeping content marketing organized
 If you get unorganized, you risk missing deadlines and publishing sub-par content – both
of which can kill readership fast.
4. Writing content with a strategy, purpose and goal
5. Focusing too much on content and neglecting other channels
 Content is used to convert paid search traffic; Used by sales team to close deal.
6. Driving ROI from content marketing
7. Understanding technical SEO and growing organic traffic
8. Lacking budget

Limitations: Solutions
Research your Audience
 Creating engaging content for the right audience can only be done by conducting thorough
research on your customer.
 Consider yourself a learner of the art of content making rather then an expert.
 Don’t assume that you know exactly what kind of content your customers will like or need.
 Research on your competitors and analyze data of your website’s traffic.
 Test your webpages & Email campaigns and gather feedback from customers.
Resist content overkill
 Sometimes your blog might not be getting as many subscribers as you hoped it would.
 So, don’t panic and rather then spamming your blog with one article after another, spend
time on producing quality content that is a clear reflection of your brand message and story

Limitations: Solutions
Define your Budget
 The trick is not to produce a ton of random content but well-researched content that will
offer lasting value to your customers.
 Your spend on content creation should depend on utility of the content, ie; is it a one-time
content such as a webpage or ongoing content such as blog articles.
 Once you understand what kinds of content you will create, this will give you a fair idea of
how much you need to spend on creating content.
 Further decisions could be extended in terms of deciding teams; In-house content team or
outsourced or freelancers.
 Right persons for right job. For example, someone with a journalistic background will be able
to write you the best blogposts, while a copywriter will pen down the perfect call to action
content for your webpages.

Tracking
 As more and more businesses and brands turn to content
marketing, there’s also an increasing pressure to showcase
results. The primary questions remains on the Return on
Investment (ROI).
 Providing readers with valuable and engaging content is
excellent, but businesses also need to measure the impact of
that content to determine the best type of content, the best
distribution channels, the most effective advertising tactics
and social media strategies.
 To help you map the outcomes of your content marketing
strategy, here is a list of content marketing ROI metrics you
should be tracking.
Consumption
metrics
Sharing
metrics
Lead
generation
metrics
Sales Metrics

Tracking
Turn your content marketing upside down and focus first on
what behaviors you want your content consumers to perform.
Once you’ve done that, you can start measuring the efficacy of
your content program
Content cannot be measured with a single metric, hence you
need to create an array of metrics

Tracking: Metrics
1. Consumption Metrics
 This is the most fundamental type of content metric.
 Unfortunately here many programs both start and end but the key is to not stop here.
 It is a critical data point, and is generally easy to derive through Google Analytics,
YouTube insights, or similar
 Key insights: Number of people consumed your content, measured as page views,
downloads, or views.
2. Sharing Metrics
 Here we measure the success your content in getting consumers to share it with others,
as determined by tweets, likes, LinkedIn shares, Google + shares, Diggs, and the like.
 This is the metric type that probably gets too much love, because it’s often public which
drives up the sexiness factor.

 This metric may be adjusted considerably by making social sharing easier and more obvious for your
readers and watchers.
 Key Insights: How often did consumers of your content shared it with others, on what platform
 Its time to sniff dollars now and not just gathering eyeballs.
 Whether you require registration before allowing people to read/watch/download your content (Not
recommended), or whether you’re measuring leads generated after content is consumed, this is where
we start determining whether the content marketing effort is making financial sense.
 Setting a browser cookie and track when someone fills out that lead form after viewing your content.
 Install simple script that shows a different (trackable) phone number when people first access the content
 Key Insights: How often do content consumers turn into leads?
Tracking: Metrics
3. Lead Generation Metrics

4. Sales metrics
 If you’re using some sort of customer and prospect database (Eg: Highrise, Sugar CRM) you’ll want
to note in the prospect record that the potential customer consumed content pieces X, Y, and Z.
 When the prospect turns into a sale, you may determine the projected revenue and profit of that
customer, and assign it to the content pieces.
 For instance, a consumer visits 5 blog posts before buying a product worth Rs 1,00,000, then each
piece of the blog post should be worth Rs 20,000.
 Key Insights How often do content consumers turn into customers?
 Measured with CRM or Google analytics.
Tracking: Metrics
5. Tracking cost Savings
 Cost savings is basically your actual profit: (Converted Leads – Total Cost per Lead).
 You need to factor in the money you spent paying employees or freelancers in creating the content.

Tracking: Metrics
 This also includes all the overheads such as the rent, insurance, utilities, hosting fees, subscriptions
and software costs.
6. Customer Retention
 Cost of retaining customer is much less then gaining a new customer.
 By customer retention, we not only mean the new leads coming in but also the average life of the
existing customers. Your goals must be to keep all customers longer and happier. You can measure
this via your CRM to track what kinds of content are being consumed by your customers and
measure whether that content has helped in retention and renewal of subscriptions.

Blog
A blog is a frequently updated online personal journal or diary. It is a place to
express your ideas, knowledge, feelings to the world. Blog is a short form for the
word weblog and the two words are used interchangeably.

Blog
Blog is an essential and brilliant tool for creating and
publishing content.
Platform for you to share your ideas and thoughts
with the world.
You can write posts such as product announcements,
service guides, thought leadership articles, press
announcements so on.

Blog
How it works – Few guidelines
 Know your audience and keep in mind the goals you’re trying to achieve through your blog. Track if
these goals are being met via Google or your custom analytics tool.
 Write down killer headlines which will improve the open-rate of your blogposts, especially if you
are marketing it via e-newsletters or life-cycle emails.
 Give your blog beautiful design as well as make it user friendly, to help your customers easily find RSS
subscription icon, search box, your contact information and social sharing icons.
 Categorized your topics well and add relevant keywords and tags so that customers can easily find
the blogposts.
 Keep an eye out for spam comments and enable the comment moderation feature which allows you to
filter spams.

Blog : Benefits
A blog is primarily a community-building tool, through which marketers generate
leads based on new subscriptions, which might also directly or indirectly lead to a sale.
It is a tool for content maximization
For Example: Let’s say a travel website launches a package for Ladhakh. Now, you
create a blogpost for the same and market on your blog.
Most importantly, your blog helps to build trust and nurture good relations with your
customers and retain them longer.

Blog : Case study
River Pools and Spas Blog
 River Pools and Spas (RPS) was a small business that sold swimming pools in USA
 Limited exposure to marketing techniques led him to rely on traditional marketing
campaigns, which tended to be costly.
 Started using his website as a marketing tool and blog to draw site traffic.
 After it started blogging, it accumulated blog subscribers, increased site traffic, and
generated leads even during low-demand seasons.
 PPC costly; hence relied on better organic search results
 Better frequency of posts, 2 per week.
 Approx 45,000 monthly blog page views, and between 300 and 500 views for each
blog article. Among top 5% of all in-ground companies.

Blog : Case study
River Pools and Spas Blog

Lifecycle Emails
“Sending The Right Message To The Right Customer At The Right Time”
 Lifecycle emails are basically permission-based
emails that offer value to your customers.
 When your customers sign-up for your product
or service, you can prompt them for these email
subscriptions

Lifecycle Emails : How it works.
These emails are usually meant to educate its customers about some commonly
existing problem, or trend.
It may also be certain insights, strategies or know-how’s that you offer to your
customers in order help them with their tasks.
You can spread these lifecycle emails over the course of a week, month, or more.
For example: There is accompany that sells travel packages. They can create lifecycle
emails, which provide their customers with helpful strategies in overcoming travel
challenges such as costs and destination updates.

Lifecycle Emails : Case
1. Amazon
 Amazon is massive company. Although primarily
being an e-commerce firm, their welcome email
tell new users about other things too.
 They emphasis on digital content in this email,
because of higher margin than physical products.
 Think strategically about the call to action in your
welcome email.
 Instead of driving customers towards popular
products or content, drive them to high margin
products and high converting content.

2. Basecamp
 Basecamp’s singular goal in this email is
to get the user signed in. They trust that
the product will sell itself. The email is
simply a bridge from the inbox to the
app. If your product is great, that’s all
you need.
 They mention in the email that 1.5
million other organizations are using
Basecamp. That’s a massive number and
a great use of social proof.

3. FAB
 There’s a lot going on this welcome email from Fab
but they make it work by making the email look
great – the design is really beautiful – and using
upbeat copy.
• “discover fun, colorful products”
• “Smiles. Guaranteed.”
• “We promise you will love your Fab purchase.”
 Overall, it’s a nice experience and there are a
number of ways to engage with the site directly
from this email.

4. Inbox by Gmail
 Because Inbox is a new concept to most users,
Gmail has taken the “FAQ” approach to their
welcome email.
 It’s likely that some users still don’t quite
understand how it works.
 The video, along with the six questions and
answers, make it clear how the product works
and gets users excited to try it out.

Lifecycle Emails: Benefits
 Lifecycle email is a massive opportunity.
 Since they are targeted for your new customers, their
primary goal is to drive your sales funnel.
 Help to accomplish marketing goal like, increase
engagement, increased sales, onboard new users, bring
back inactive ones and, most importantly, earn trust.
 Instead of direct pitch for the product or service, you offer value to customers.
 This recognize you as a thought leaders in the industry.
 In that sense, it is more of brand building but one that gently pushes your customers
towards a sale.

Lifecycle Emails: Dos & Don'ts
Dos
Do explore
experiential/ non-
financial incentives
Do create a burning
platform
Do track KPIs
Don’ts
Don’t over-segment
before you experiment
Don’t let assumptions
dictate your
testing/marketing
strategy
Don’t worry about
over-engineering the
process on day one

E-Newsletters
Like lifecycle emails, e-Newsletters are also permission-based
emails that offer value to your customers.
When your customers sign-up for your product or service, you can
prompt them for these e-Newsletters' subscriptions.
e-newsletters are typically distributed weekly or monthly, the
distribution of lifecycle emails can vary according to your campaign.

E-Newsletters: How it works.
 E-newsletters are emails you send out to both existing and new customers.
 The emails can contain information about your product, service or even company- related
information.
 You can include full-length articles or short image-based content, which links out to some
specific landing pages of your website.

E-Newsletters: Benefits
E-newsletter is a promotional tool for your content.
You can also create aggregated content such as a round-up of all your blogposts for
a particular month and send it out as an e-newsletter to your customers.
For instance, you can email your customers a new whitepaper, an e-book, a
webinar, or a video that you have recently created.

White paper
 Whitepaper or a research paper, is a kind of an extended report which focuses on a
particular topic, elaborates it, and explains it in detail.
 White paper continues to serve as the basis of highly effective content marketing.
Properties of a white Paper
 It is a long and linear narrative which argues a certain concept, while backing the
argument with data and research.
 The language used is formal and may also include technical jargon used by experts.
 A whitepaper can consist of statistical tables, quotes from leading research
firms, excerpts from academic books etc.
 The contents of a whitepaper should be text-heavy meant for deep reading.

White paper
 Rich, substantive content that educates, not sells.
 New ideas that prompt and provoke innovative thinking.
 A clearly communicated point of view on issues that are highly relevant and timely.
 Statistically sound data and well-researched findings.
Importance of white Paper
Purpose of writing a white Paper
You can talk about your expertise and educate prospective customers about your
business.
If you sell a high worth product, then the customers will buy or subscribe to only
after due research. Hence, a whitepaper which guides them in their buying decisions
will be a great idea.
Or if you want people to know about the technical aspect of your company.

White paper
START
Plan
Audience Story
conversations
Process Channels
Measurement
END

White paper: Examples
1. Pardot
 Pardot has honed the skill of writing a compelling title. Whitepaper having brief &
clearly expressed names, promise of useful information draws a reader in.
 Many of the titles promise complete information that would negate the need for any
other resource.
 The title emphasizes on the need of paper in order to succeed at marketing
automation.
 Other titles offer a unique spin on the common tropes of whitepapers.
 For instance: “A Sales and Marketing Love Story.” That’s a title that creates happy
feelings in the reader while promising to teach them how to improve their
interdepartmental relationships.

White paper: Examples
2. DocuSign
 The big lesson from DocuSign is that you shouldn’t be afraid to get technical.
 DocuSign has a huge library of whitepapers, including ones that highlight how the company’s
services impact different elements of business.
 It covers topics ranging from financial processing to customer experience.
 The library also covers the impact of electronic signatures in various industries, such as
health care, insurance, and banking.
 Even with the more technical industries and business departments, it should break down
complex concepts into simple ideas that readers of any experience level will understand.
 Make your subject matter approachable in these educational publications.
 Think of each piece as taking the reader through elementary school.

Case Study
Case studies are primarily B2B marketing content. However,
this are also a good way to communicate own success stories.
It is typically a 1st person narrative written in the form of a story.
Case studies mainly features a particular aspect of client’s story,
narrating how a client used your product or service to achieve its
business goals.
It may be seen as a testimonial which relates to a real-life event.
It may also cover own success stories on certain aspects.
For example: About a certain company’s challenges, solutions
and results, at times using direct quotes from the company.

Case Study: Purpose
Case studies are basically seen as a trust-building contents.
It is created with the intent to build your credibility and trust among your
customers.
You can market this case study as a press announcement, email campaign
or website.
For instance, if your company sells services/solutions to come company,
then a possible case study might feature how that company was
benefitted after using your solution to bring down its costs and saved time.

Case Study: Examples
Maersk first began using social back in 2011.
It focused on the stories that emerged from within the business
For example: How it is helping fuel a boom in the sale of Kenyan avocados
and where its staff comes from.
It marked its availability on every social media tailored to that platform
For Example: On LinkedIn, it promotes job vacancies and publishes those
cases about the work culture within the business, while on Instagram it
encourages followers to post photos of their ships using the hashtag
#Maersk.
Result: Maersk saw huge surge in social media followers

Case Study: Examples
OPENTEXT is a software solution for enterprise information
management.
It created a personalized new customer onboarding site offering a
variety of assets (white papers, checklists, product pages, ebooks,
case studies) and content to welcome new clients and provide up-
sell and cross-sell opportunities.
The campaign also included a two phase nurturing program.
Results: 1,700 new contacts were identified along with 31 new
opportunities worth $1.8 million.

e-Books
 E-book is more informal, loose and more playful for of white paper.
 It has more visuals and usually has simple everyday language.
 The content must be entertaining and easily consumable with bold
headlines, callouts, and bulleted lists.
 ebook is written in a very concise style keeping in mind that readers
skim and skip.
 Ideas and concepts an ebook contains have to be interesting and
preferably those that are trending and current.

e-Books: Benefits
They can bring your website traffic and generate more leads.
You can market free ebooks, as an incentive for new customers to subscribe.
When they land on a specific page of your website, you can prompt them to
collect their free ebook.
You can also market these ebooks via email campaigns.

e-Books: Examples
The inbound methodology turns “strangers into customers and
promoters of your business,”
“Inbound is about creating and sharing content with the world.
By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream
customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business
and keeps them coming back for more.”
Its content library includes: Marketing kits, Templates, User
guides, Case studies, Webinars, Worksheets

Mobile Applications
 With the increase in use of internet through hand
held devices, Mobile applications are awesome tools
for marketing your content to a mass population.
 If you do business online, then you should definitely
consider creating a mobile application as one of
your priority content goals.
 Helps you capture this customer segment and drive
more traffic and sales.
 Notifications vs SMS
 Push ads.

Webinars
A webinar is a participatory experience, where attendees can access the conference via a weblink
or a meeting invitation
Planning your webinar
Creating your webinar
Promoting your webinar
Managing and running your webinar
Guide to make your webinar a success

Webinars
Benefits
Webinar typically is accompanied by online presentations
Webinars, or webcasts as they are alternatively called, are very effective for
B2B content marketing.
Webinars are primarily looked upon as educational content and helps you to
set yourself as a thought leader in the business.
By offering quick and actionable tips that resonate with your audience, you
can earn their trust and word-of-mouth recommendation.

Podcasts
 Podcast and webinars are spectacular pieces of content that
can be easily consumed, by an audience, without any hassles.
 Unlike an online video, podcast is not location centric.
Customers can listen to your podcast or webinar anytime,
anywhere, while doing anything.
 Although video can be used for podcasts, audio podcasts are
more popular and preferred by most people.
A podcast is primarily a one-way communication, where you pre-record a discussion on a
topic that will interest your customers, and then release it for your audience

Podcasts
Benefits
A podcast is a great tool to talk to your target audience and can be a great
community-building tool.
You can distribute the podcasts as an RSS feed on your website or on podcast
directories such as iTunes.
The best thing about podcasts is that you can take any existing content that you
have such as a presentation, video, or even a blogpost and then re-hash it to create
a script for your podcast.

Podcasts
Examples
1. Bon Appetit Magazine: Foodcast
 Bon Appetit’s podcast “features
interviews with chefs, writers or
anyone who has something cool to
say about food.”
 Topics include holiday baking, why
chefs hate brunch and FAQs for
Thanksgiving dinner.
 If you can schedule great guests and
figure out the tech specs, this can be
a meaningful channel to engage with
storytellers over the long term.
2. Tortuga Backpacks: Power Trip Travel
Podcast.
 A weekly podcast at the intersection of
travel and entrepreneurship.
 The show is hosted by Fred Perrotta
and Jeremy Michael Cohen, the co-
founders of Tortuga Backpacks.
 Join us for the stories behind your
favorite travel gear, products, websites,
and apps from their creators
 Tips like, the best ways to travel better,
cheaper, and with less hassle.

Infographics
Almost every business today creates a video or infographics as part of their content
marketing program.
With infographics, you can help your customers understand a specific problem that you
solve for them.
They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system's
ability to see patterns and trends.
Help to create brand awareness, generate sales leads and establish yourself as a
thought leader in the industry.
Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or
knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly.

Infographics: Benefits
Easily catches the attention of targeted audience.
Increases brand awareness.
Better probability of going viral.
Improves search marketing results.
Enhances the number of subscribers & followers.
Portable and can be easily embedded.
Make it simple to understand.
May expand beyond digital channel.
Positions you as an expert.
Easy to track with analytics.

Articles
Articles are essential to the success of your content marketing strategy, be it long-copy
feature articles or the new-fangled, instruction based, step-by-step how-to ones.
Used to discuss industry trends, Offer solutions to typical concerns of customers or
start a discussion.
Based on article campaign and research on competitor and market analysis, you can
create well-informed articles, which speak to your readers.
Publishing articles in top tier sites can drive huge traffic to your website and grow
your list of subscribers and sales leads.
Publishing thought-leadership pieces on your community blog can attract potential
customers & industry experts who can influence your customers buying decisions.

Press releases
Essential to provide your brand more exposure and recognition.
Generally a press release comes under PR and marketing, and they help you to
inform your potential buyers of your products and services.
Include links to specific pages on your website
Make sure that your landing pages directly relate to the press release.
Optimize your press release for search and social media
Use appropriate keywords in your release and post a copy of your press release
on your website.
Incorporate trackable promotion codes where appropriate
Best Practice

Press releases
Incorporate a promotion into your press release
1. Southwest Airlines:
 It generated $1.5 million in sales from four press releases.
 When you use this form of promotion, create special
promotion codes to track your results.
 Be very clear about the timing on your pricing.
 Consider that this type of promotion might go viral, so you
must have sufficient product or your prospects will feel
cheated.
Example

Press releases
2. Coca-Cola:
 Visually creative layout consistent with brand
messaging
 Provides a centralized, social-media-equipped
online information headquarters for
mainstream journalists and consumer.
 Coca-Cola has invested heavily in social business and it shows. With seven of the most
popular social networks prominently featured in the footer, along with follower
numbers, making it easy for users to engage everywhere.
 Offers a digital tool for all areas of communication, including investor relations, employee
relations, marketing and brand awareness

Social Media
How to use social media channel
 Essential part of any content marketing strategy
today.
 Includes B2B and B2C marketing aspects.
 Covers different social media channels such as
social sharing networks, video channels, photo
sharing sites, online communities, and more.
 Although most of them are all similar yet different
from each other.

Social Media
The framework for developing a social media strategy consists of three potential
functions:
 Public relations and marketing,
 Sales
 Customer services.

Social Media
1. Facebook
Facebook is the prime social network channels.
More than a billion users
Used by most of your customers.
Share interesting and brief content such as compelling
messages or shareable pictures.
Posts or articles on your products
Cover industry events, well-edited images, interesting
quotes, and whatever you think works with your audience.

Social Media
2. #Twitter
6,000 tweets/sec are tweeted on Twitter, ie; over 350,000
tweets/minute, which implies 500 million tweets/day and
around 200 billion tweets/year.
Important tool for 1-1 interactions & Immediate response
Effective tool it comes to reaching out to your customers.
Use hashtags generously but always be relevant to the
context.
Short and crisp message, preferably use links.
Create contests

Social Media
3. YouTube & Vimeo
YouTube and Vimeo are video channels where you can store
your videos online and allow people to embed them on their
websites and blogs.
Always allow embedding of your videos as you want as many
people to share them as possible.
Create short videos and show snippets of scenes stitched
together in a 1 to 2 minute video.
Make videos about customers and their problems, not
about your company.

Social Media
Why YouTube
 YouTube has over 1 Bn users — almost 1/3rd of all people on the Internet
Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and
generate billions of views.
YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34
and 18-49 year-olds
The number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40% y/y since March
2014.

Social Media
YouTube Mobile
On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40
minutes, up more than 50% y/y.
The number of hours people spent watching videos on mobile is up
100% y/y.
More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
Vimeo
More then 37 million registered users
More than 20% B2B marketers use Vimeo to distribute content

Social Media
4. Instagram & Flickr
 Instagram and Flickr are the most prominent photo sharing sites
on the internet.
 Drive back traffic to your website by linking relevant call to action
button in your images and photos.
 Try sharing not only official content but photos that bring out your
brand’s personality.
 A kind of ‘behind the scenes’ image of your company.
 Build a strong community by asking your followers to post photos
for a contest.

Social Media
Instagram
 Instagram is a highly engaged global community with more than 400M active accounts.
 People come to Instagram for visual inspiration and the simple design allows
captivating visuals to take center stage.
 Advertising on Instagram has the power to move people — inspiring them to see a
business differently or take action.

Social Media
4. Pinterest & Quora
 Pinterest and Quora are basically online communities and among
the largest today.
 With Pinterest, don’t just post images and pictures.
 You can even pin videos and landing pages, so that customers are
encouraged to interact with your website’s actual content.
 As for Quora, it’s all about asking the right questions and
answering them correctly.
 You should also follow topics and people who can influence your
customers to buy your product or service.

Social Media
BenefitsofUsingSocialMediaChannels
 The explosion of social media in the last decade has changed the way we interact with
each other online.
 This has also changed the way businesses communicate with their customers.
 Build you brand reputation and recognition among potential buyers.
 Drive traffic to your websites, which can lead to sales.
 Gives small-to-medium size businesses a level playing field, where they can still get
customers even if they do not rank in search engines.
 Allows you to directly interact with customers and understand their problems better.

FORD
This is one of the smartest community building campaigns by any company so far.
It is a platform for Ford customers to share their ideas and stories with Ford.
Ford uses all kinds of content – articles, photos, videos – to tell their story, while
never failing to make it all about the customer

FORD
#FiestaMovement on YouTube
 Drove 200 Million Views On YouTube From #Influencer Videos
 The company held a combination search/contest/audition
 Ford called it the first “entirely user-generated campaign.”
 In this, YouTubers and other social media influencers could apply, via a public submission on
YouTube, to be one of 100 Ford Fiesta “agents.”
 Received initial views from participants; The goal was to create value and humanize the Ford
brand in an appropriate way for multiple audience segments.
 100 finalists were given a Ford Fiesta for 8 months with all expences paid to make videos
around a theme.
 An orchestra of musical instruments by a contestant out of his car, resulting in a music video
with 500,000 view.

FORD
Vine: It usually have short & funny videos, which FORD successfully did.
https://vine.co/v/Mh7VInKTHha/embed
https://vine.co/v/MqZPZLTpDuh/embed
Facebook
 Ford ran an interesting campaign, ‘to show Ford your very worst examples of pot-holes’.
 Ford then gave detailed advice, via a video and text, as to what to do examine after
you’ve hit a particularly nasty one and how to fight back.
Twitter
 Ford was one of the first companies to enjoy Twitter’s new layout.
 It ensured that its profile and header images are correctly optimized to the new format.
 Ford uses Twitter as an engagement channel.

Kraft Foods: Introduction
Worldwide headquarters in Northfield, Illinois, U.S.
Sales in more than 155 Countries & Operations in 70 Countries

Kraft Foods: Strategy
A scaled down version of the actual website.
Offers consumers access to a host of recipes.
To demonstrate the values and attributes of Kraft’s brands in
an interactive way and provide consumers with relevant
information such as recipes and nutrition information.
The motive behind mobile marketing was to involve
consumers and help them integrate the company’s brands
into their everyday lives.

Kraft Foods: Strategy
Jan’08: The 3
in 1 & 2 in 1
campaign
Dec’08: iFood
Assistant
Launched
May’09:
Launched a
new Mobile
website
Follow-up
Campaign in
Germany/Aust
ria
June’09: Oreo
campaign for
UK
• Unique codes were placed inside or on the pack of the coffee product
• On messaging the codes, user would get direct link to mobile portal

Kraft Foods: Results
Overwhelming response
Received about 500000 requests for samples
80000+ users registered their details for future communication with the brand
Target a specific audience and save money and reduce time
Built a potential customer database for future marketing
3in1/2in1 in Germany was a truly 360' campaign
Incorporated sampling via mobile market
Created value for the brand

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