My Journey with Acadium (Part 2 - Content Marketing)

This course will look into content marketing, giving me insight into any extra tool and strategies I can use, which will be useful across my voluntary work with Pink Hub Club and WSM Pride, as well as any freelancing or paid opportunities I come across in the near future.

CONTENT MARKETING //

• 71% consumers trust brands that provide useful information without trying to sell their product or service - information that is relevant to their audience and brand values.

• Content Marketing reduces the costs associated with traditional marketing

• Youtube is a good resource to use if you don't have the money for courses

• BuzzSumo - can be used to find trending stories in your niche.

• Forums like Reddit and Quora allows you to join relevant discussions and share links to your content (to add value to a conversation and gain trust).

• Goals -

  • Goals depend on the business size, what business stage they are in and target market

  • Brand Awareness can be achieved through relevant content and building a reputation as a thought leader. KPI - mentions on social media and other online sources.

  • Generating Leads - can be achieved after campaign publush date.

  • Revenue - sneak peaks before product launch and utilising awareness days is an effective way to build familiarity and excitement when a new product becomes available.

  • SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bounce)

• Blogging-

  • Companies with a blog receive 97% more links to their website, resulting in a higher SEO ranking

  • Hemingway App can be used to see your writing level and improve word choice and sentence structures.

  • Recommended average blog post to be 1,890 words. Read over popular bloggers regularly to learn tone of voice and sentence structure: examples include Neil Patel, Tim Ferris and Rand Fishkin.

  • Be consistent with blog post scheduling - keep a content planner

  • Can use Pinterest to direct people to your blog - cover images for blog that explain what the article is about.

  • Ads can be added onto your website to generate an income

• Visual & Video Posts

  • Always save images in PNG for best quality. JPEG for smaller file size options

  • Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading in a text. Also improved click through rates in email campaigns.

  • Promo and Canva have large stock libraries for video creation

• Podcast

  • Convenient for work commutes, gym or desk work.

  • Run a survey to find out what type of content people want to see - content shoud evoke an emotional response and provide valuable information.

  • Formats - interviews, individual thoughts, and curated programs (news/updates from their industry).

  • Goal - educate, inspire or entertain

STEPPS framework - Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value and Stories

• This framework is a guideline helping posts go viral.

• Social Currency = The need to look good in front of others. Create content that will make you visitors look good: 'how to' posts.

• Triggers = the stimuli that prompt people to think about related things: like Aldi's post 'always the tagger never the tagged @M&S', making users reflect on recent court cases.

• Emotion = feeling something when you consume content. Light-hearted and upbeat posts tend to have the highest success rates.

• Public = sharing and imitating things everyone else around them is doing: blackout social media boxes as a protest. Also included is social proofing your products through reviews.

• Practical Value = content that provides practical value and helps others

• Stories = people love stories. A popular way to deliver information. Content needs to have a strong narrative that relates wth audience.

My Takeaway

Taking into account my most recent Marketing qualification, I think it was a brilliant refresher course, highlighting key marketing areas such as using content to build engagement rather than just selling a product or service. This is something that can also be extended through blogging, using content to keep an audience engaged and interested.

One platform I hadn't really considered using is Pinterest. I have always associated Pinterest with generating visual inspiration, particularly for design work, so I had never really considered that people would also use the platform for shopping inspiration. It has made me think differently about how visual platforms can influence people earlier in the buying process.

I think a concept I haven't heard since my undergraduate degree in Graphic Design is the STEPPS framework. This reminded me of campaigns designed to trigger FOMO, which is closely linked to the Public element of the framework.

FOMO, or fear of missing out, is something that seems to have grown in society due to the over-saturation of media feeds. As humans, we seek social groups, which historically was important for survival. Today, social groups can also create a sense of belonging and make us feel connected to others.

A direct example of campaigns designed to trigger FOMO can be seen in food marketing, where food can take you into a new world or become part of a social conversation. Seeing other people experiencing something can make you feel that you are missing out if you aren't part of it.

Other marketing strategies can use similar methods, such as referral marketing. This can involve sharing things that make you look good (Social Currency), helping others save time when making a decision (Practical Value), and following the behaviours of other people you can relate to (Public).

I think this is what I found interesting about revisiting the STEPPS framework. It shows that marketing isn't always about directly selling something. Sometimes it is about understanding why people want to share something, why they engage with it, and how other people's behaviours can influence our own decisions.