As traditional media loses it effectiveness—more and more so in recent years—companies have struggled with effective brand building.
Consumers no longer give a shit about what brands tell them. They care way more about what other people are saying about these brands.
So what can businesses and startups do to build a brand?
Content marketing.
A key component in successful inbound marketing, content marketing revolves around creating and distributing meaningful content.
Instead of telling your consumers to buy your products and believe in your brand, this strategy pulls people toward your company and product, which drives higher conversion rates and ultimately, revenue.
As inbound marketing is the core marketing strategy in my own business, I strongly believe that employees in all parts of a company’s hierarchy—from entry level executives to CEOs—need to start creating content in order for the company to have a chance of succeeding in the next 10 years.
During one of my lectures at NEXT Academy’s digital marketing bootcamp, I discovered that people have a kind of inertia when it comes to creating content. The truth is, it’s a habit that needs to be cultivated and at the beginning, some people need to be forced (lol).
It’s something that anyone with a smartphone can do as evidenced by the following videos, which the students created in just three hours.
1) Stereotypes Against 6 women
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MAG5CZ4sP2o
This is a great example to showcase and present a problem that your business aims to solve. Get multiple panelists, talk about a problem and their experience with a particular situation. Ideally, you should like to talk about the solution towards the second half of the video to connect the pieces.
2) Digital Marketing Bootcampers
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dkSFPik78Ik
Review videos are extremely powerful especially if there are human elements in them. People (especially millennials and younger) tend to trust user-generated reviews a lot more than brand generated content—which is most likely bullshit. This gives strong credibility to your business.
3) Yappy Goodness Shampoo Demonstration
This has to be one of my favourite videos from the students! Product demonstration videos give your product a stronger depth in authenticity as it shows you how to use a product. For newer products, consumers get to see the product in action for the very first time before making their purchase.
4 ) How Tech Startups Can Make Your Life Easier
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nPR7hhKIIBM
Lifestyle videos like this will help fit your product into the user journey. If you think people may not have a feel on how your product can impact their life, create videos like this and demonstrate how your product can help a person solve problems in their daily life.
If pictures are worth a thousand words, videos are worth a million. If you’ve noticed, most of the content created was in video format. Reason being, Google and younger consumers are starting to love video content more and more each day.
With the latest Penguin algorithm update to their core and faster internet speed on mobile, videos are getting more and more attention from Googlebot (and younger humans), which leads to better SEO, worldwide awareness and inbound traffic in the long run!
With these examples in mind, I would like to re-iterate the purpose of the exercise, that everyone can and should create content. You just have to put in the effort and start creating.
P/S : Did you know that Vulcan Post also offers content marketing services? 😛
Jeremy Ong is a teacher, entrepreneur and digital marketer with programming knowledge. He loves tech products and the internet. He also enjoys playing Magic: The Gathering during his free time. Check out his blog for cool (but sporadic) content.
Feature image credit: astrusweb.com