Tag: Content Marketing

The Age of Content Curation

Post author By Ideas for Change
Post date 2020년 December 27일
No Comments on The Age of Content Curation

Curation has transformed the ways we get information and goods. As tons of new contents are being created over and over, content curation becomes wide-spread.

person writing on brown wooden table near white ceramic mug — Photo by @craftedbygc from Unsplash

The origin of curation

The word “curate” comes from the Latin “curatus,” the past participle tense of “curare,” which means “to take care of.” Over the decades, the word “curate” has spread around museums and exhibitions. Then it became a buzzword as the content marketing has boomed as a marketing strategy bible.

The boom of content curation

The term ‘choice disorder(hamlet syndrome)’ was once popular in South Korea. When there are too many options to choose, we feel burden and often end up giving up to make a choice. Now or then, it is unchanging fact that too many choices overwhelm us.

The overflow of information has brought the age of curation forward. With tons of information to process, we want to get the most relevant and quality information from the experts.

There are many curation services that provide the most relevant information we need. Like the daily e-mails you read every morning while you commute.

Curation, how they gained popularity?

Why has the curation services gained popularity?

First, customer demands. Because there were demands, there were supplies. Second, and more importantly, the entrance barrier for suppliers got lowered. Now, anyone can be a curator, and any goods or services can be curated. Third, the demands for convenience helped curation services to combine with subscription economy, developing the curation model with higher sustainability.

black and white the north face bag — Photo by @zacharykeimig from Unsplash

Everyone can be a curator now

Along with these customer needs to save time and energy, the domain of curation has widened; curation is not a exclusive domain for journalists or brand shops anymore.

First, the provider has decentralized. Anyone or any companies can be a curator, as there are lots of platforms to use. We can make and share our voices to the public through many channels at any time.

MacBook Pro — Photo by @melipoole from Unsplah

Many B2C companies provide recommended lists based on our behaviors or through AI algorithms. With the help of AI, the content curation is getting more sophisticated and personalized. Sometimes, when Spotify or YouTube recommend the audio or video clips, they seem to know me better than I do.

Content curation is becoming ubiquitous

Supplies surge where the demands are strong. The ecommerce market is getting more competitive. Many companies have introduced curation services. Also, similar curation services have emerged in many areas – news, books, e-mails, music, clips, photos, places, meal kits, job searches, clothes, health items, stationery goods and all the objects you consume.

Now, curation services have moved beyond the tangible goods to intangible services. Medical services that perfectly suits to my health conditions, cloud gaming services, leisure sports services…the list goes on ad on. They are still evolving in all kinds of areas, and it won’t be long until we find the curation services all over the place to save our time for scavenging.

Curation met subscription economy

Trusted curation services often become workable financial model. Subscription models are representative – monthly flower subscription, monthly book delivery, weekly wine subscription… Many curated services has settled with subscription. You might subscribe more than a couple of services.

Some companies send you the boxes filled with curated products. They are automatically delivered to your door. Or some companies provide you the movies or TV programs of your favorite genre. They simplify the selecting and buying process while meeting personal preferences. The beauty of simplification; the service provider “takes care of” all the hassle, and we just enjoy!

Still, we need to make choices

Instead of spending time to search for something useful, now we often spend time to choose which curated services to use. Now, even new subscription brokerage platforms appeared, which allow you to see at a glance various subscription services at once. Still, we need to make a choice to select the right one among selections.

woman wearing white shirt standing inside library — Photo by @itsbrandonlopez from Unsplash

It has been a few years since content curation and subscription economy became a new normal. And this new paradigm of consumption will last for years. We, consumers, will open our wallets as long as the curation services reduce the burden from the buying process.

Tags Content Curation, Content Marketing, Curation, Subscription Economy

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4 Best Content Marketing Practices – Give what customers want

Post author By Ideas for Change
Post date 2020년 December 1일
No Comments on 4 Best Content Marketing Practices – Give what customers want

“Give to get” – this simple trading strategy is also applicable to the marketing world. Companies want customers attention and their loyal affection. Customers want the valued information they are looking for.

Here are the best practices of companies that mobilized this simple strategy. They gave customers relevant content of their interests, and got their affection in return.

1. Red Bull

Red Bull branded their content with a strong focus on their customers. Their website is full of content related to extreme sports, gaming, music, leisure sports, and anything else that might capture the attention of their target audience.

Public Relations – Red Bull's Content Marketing Strategy

Red Bull mobilizes all media they can fetch(videos, social media, blogs, images, magazines, TV, etc.) to provide the interests of customers. It’s a bold and genius way to capture the attention of their target audience, instead of direct promotion of their products.

RedBullContentPool.com is another way that Red Bull cares their customers’ interests and lifestyle. They provide high quality stock photos and videos for editorial use, by publishers, news agencies, TV stations, etc., often with a Red Bull logo embedded.

Red Bull Marketing Strategy: What You Need to Know + How to Copy It

2. John Deere

Farm Collector Magazine - THE BIGGER BOOK OF JOHN DEERE

Not many people are familiar with John Deere. However, if you know a little about content marketing, you might be familiar with it. This is because it is the progenitor of content marketing.

John Deere is a brand of Deere & Company, an American company that manufactures axles, transmissions, gearboxes and lawn care equipment for use in agricultural, construction and forestry machinery, diesel engines and heavy machinery. This industry doesn’t seem match well with the magazine. However, John Deere publishes the agricultural magazine The Furrow, which was first published in 1895.

Farrow rarely mentions John Deere. It provides information that consumers need and wants to know. This simple fact of providing the information customers need is difficult to maintain in practice.

3. Coca-Cola

brandchannel: Coca-Cola Puts Fans on the Can in Australia

Coca-Cola mobilized a simple but powerful psychological motivation that everyone has: “I want to be called and recognized as myself”. They selected 150 of the most common names in Australia, so that you can drink your own’Custom Coke’ by engraving it on a bottle of Coke. The reaction of the public was explosive. People fought and bought a coke bottle with their name on it.

After the great success in Australia, Coca-Cola expanded its campaign to the world. The success factor of this event lies in’customization’, which seems to be for each customer. When the public purchased a bottle of cola with their name, they felt as if they had become a special person, which soon led to explosive consumption.

4. Buffer

3 Simple Lessons from the Success of Buffer's Blog - MobiLoud

Social media company Buffer is known for its radical approach to transparent communication. They even shared salaries of all 71 employees, posting them on a public website. Buffer employees reveal themselves and post writings on private stories such as their personal experiences, corporate culture or problem-solving methods that Buffer uses for clients.

Buffer’s open blog contains simple but powerful keywords of trust, openness, and communication. Those who know the blog can get detailed information on how the buffer works. It feels as if you are part of a secret club that shares high-quality information.

This psychological effect is called the velvet rope effect. When you go to the club, you’ve probably seen velvet ropes wrapped around the space for VIPs to limit access. A space only for the chosen people, which seems to be invisible. People are enthusiastic about the fantasy the velvet rope gives, and they dream of being included in the space beyond.

Buffer’s open blog is the VIP zone beyond the velvet rope. The best VIP zone that explains customer’s curiosity in detail inside the company.

Takeaways

Always focus on creating value for your customers. Share valuable information that cannot be easily found or only you can provide.

Tags Content Marketing, Marketing

Marketing

[Content Strategy] How to make engaging content?

Post author By Ideas for Change
Post date 2019년 October 30일
No Comments on [Content Strategy] How to make engaging content?

Every brand wants to make their content appealing to the eye of the audience, who might become their customers and promote brand presence in the digital world (to stand out from the crowd). That’s why brands care for engaging content.

Engaging content interests them and grasps their attention and makes them want to know more about your brand after looking at your content.

Tips to make engaging content

1. Know your audience

Audience targeting always comes first. Only after knowing your audience and their needs, you might create relatable content to them. The ideal audience profile is the foundation of any campaigns or marketing ads. Analyze your audience not only with your prediction but with actual data that you can mobilize, such as the user data from recent ads or campaign performance.

2. Create content with intent

To retain audience and to make them stay longer on your pages, the content should be focused and organized. People might lose their attention easily with unfocused and complicated content.

Take some time to consider the intent of your content before creating one. Define the content objective and keep your audience in mind. Draft the content in alignment with your intention, and make them flow with keywords.

3. Create content that’s valuable to your Audience

Therefore, to keep them engaged with your content, you need to provide value to your audience. Then, you should be able to understand perfectly about your audience. Based on your intent and audience, the content could be informative or emotionally engaging.

4. Call for attention with great headlines

Creating the perfect headline is crucial in content marketing strategy, especially when people have short attention span like now.

But making headline attractive and powerful is different from making it just clickable, or in other words, clickbait. The difference is, clickbait doesn’t meet your demands in the end; but the quality content meets the audience’s expectation.

Make sure your headlines contain your main point or keywords. The purpose of the headline is to get people’s attention to read your content, or at least your first paragraph. If great content starts with a headline that captures your reader’s attention, then the next thing is to acquire and retain audience by engaging them with great content.

5. Optimize the content

Experiment with your content to improve marketing strategies. You can try A/B testing or SEO. Make as much as relevant trials and get valuable data in the data-driven marketing.

Here are some SEO tips that you can follow: [SEO 101] SEO Tips for Performance Marketing

6. Measure engagement correctly

Deciding what to track
Tracking, measuring, and managing the data
Turning information into actionable insights

To really find out if people are engaging with your content, you can track some metrics; how long they’re spending on your site(time spent on page), scroll depth, the number of likes or comments, internal traffic and exit rate, conversion rate such as email sign ups, or social shares.

Focus on the most relevant metrics for measuring engagement as the same metrics can be misleading and could be vanity metrics that are irrelevant to engagement performance.

For example, time spent on page could be a good metric, but if you can get scroll depth data, that could provide you more accurate data. (Scroll depth measures how far down a page a visitor scrolls) Think when you walk away from devices while set laptop screen on. We often become distracted when in front of a screen. That can artificially inflate the time spent on page. Find what’s really working and set right metrics is the key to measure engagement correctly.

Tags Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Engagement