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03/05/2011 by
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Content Is A Key Business Asset

Your content is a critical business asset, certainly when taking your brand to the Social Market Space. Creating a solid content strategy and production has various benefits to a brand.

However, what we see happening is that some organisations underestimate the value of their content. Especially when it comes to connecting to the world.

Let’s sum up some benefits of good content:
– better user experience,
– it helps brands engage with a all demographic/ technographic groups and on their terms,
– greater brand consistency and recognition,
– new operational efficiencies and risk management,
– improved SEO & Analytics and
– better personalisation & targeting.

Being used instead of preferred
When you move your organisation away from plain advertising to a model that is content driven focussed on consumer engagement and that energises consumer dialogue; you energise your target to add his or her maximum value.  Nowadays your brand is being used more than it is being preferred, and if you give the people the right reason to use you: they will.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at on-line; here we don’t only see and read about your brand. We use it.

This means that the single most important thing people can find on your brand pages, on your websites, on your social media channels is information they find valuable.

Don’t use it as a gimmick
Personally one of my best practises on a solid content strategy is done by Procter & Gamble. Let me elaborate:
One of the most difficult/ embarrassing subjects to talk about are Tampons and it is difficult for brands to become a part of the decision process in buying women’s cleaning products. Simply because brands usually are not part of the discussions at home. Typical for this market is, is when a young woman makes a choice for cleaning products, a big chance that she will stick with it for the rest of her life. So how to start an embarrassing conversation with an eleven year old?

P&G’s – beeinggirl.com is not a community site on woman cleaning products, but it is a site about almost everything young girls deal with. It provides categories and content in which girls would be interested and a is place where they can “ask Iris” for advice. The site has everything to do with being a young girl and stimulates interaction between the youngsters with polls, Q&A’s, games and advice.  On the platform they introduce the teens to P&G products in an advisory manner with subtle branding.

The community monetizes an enormous amount for P&G in loyal customers, knowledge, marketing and sales. So much even that they have expanded in 44 countries. According to calculations done by P&G, connecting to their community is 4 TIMES more effective than advertising in reach its consumers.

If these girls end up sticking with these brands, they could be spending € 5,- a month on feminine products for apprx 40 years; that means € 2,400 per girl. If your margin is 20% you’ll cash € 480.-  Internationally we estimate it will cost € 4,551,723.- per year; that means you only need to persuade 9,500 girls worldwide to break even!

From then on it is making “good” profits and building long lasting relationships that add-value to customer and organization.

How can this work for you?
Building a platform like this is nice, but if you think that filling it is, is enough you might feel cheated afterwards. Your Customer Experience goes all the way. From page copy, article, links, labels, flash elements, alt-tags to error messages, task instructions, forms, search results and very important meta-data. Basically: everything!  We aren’t even including your Social Platforms.

So it is not only what, but:
what, why, how, for whom, by whom, with what, when, where, how often and WHAT NEXT?

Set-up your editorial team
mash-up an editorial team with social specialists from your social marketing agency and a few people from your brand to manage your social presence, social channels (i.e: Facebook + Twitter + YouTube), content creation, copy and  daily fan interactions you might need from the brand’s side.

Now have a look inside; is your content up to scratch?

 

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