Recently I was stumped on what to receive from my parents for Christmas. I was having the hardest time deciding whether to get money which I could put towards rent, or a pair of headphones. Of course, I picked the headphones. But this didn’t happen until I performed extensive research on what was the best headphones out on the market. It first sparked my interested when Kanye West’s Creative Director, Virgil Abloh posted a pair of headphones on his Instagram page. Prior to seeing this post, I was interested in some over the ear headphones, but I couldn’t figure out where to start to find the right pair. I have owned five different types of Beats By Dre in the past, and wanted something new, reliable, and had a sense of authenticity. Mr. Abloh posted about these headphones with a caption of, “another unboxed. I lose an average of 4 of these per year. I can’t be the only one. @atrak? @diplo? Aguillaumeberg? @_benjib?”. I read that caption and my frame of reference switched from social to prospective buyer. My instant thought was, “Who makes these headphones?”. The fact that Kanye West’s CD, who is also a pretty famous DJ who travels all over the world to DJ parties, has THESE particular headphones, makes me feel a sense of trust that they are of higher quality and reliable. ESPECIALLY since he tagged famous DJ’s such as Atrack and Diplo. I read the comments that people left, and they too were intrigued by the headphones and said things like, “What headphones are these?”, and “What headphones are they?”. Luckily, people in the comment thread said things like, “Nothing better than HD25s :-)”, “At least 4-6 pairs per year. This year I lost 4 and a half”, “Are theses the HD 25-1 II?”, “Custom HD25 strong look tho”. These comments informed me of what the headphones were, as well as, that they were of high quality, and simply dope. So immediately I did a Google search and BOOM they were at the top of the page. along with a pair that were $50 off on Amazon.com. I pressed on the Amazon link, and what do you know, the comments on the page were saying that they were the best headphones ever, and so on. At that moment I knew exactly what I wanted from my parents for Christmas.

The above story is a strong example of content marketing. Content Marketing is all about building an audience, and it was quite evident that Sennheiser did so with their brand. A very interesting eBook created by Scribe, called The Business Case For Agile Content Marketing. In this eBook they break down content marketing and talk about the importance of it, and how valuable an audience is.

Instead of purchasing access to an audience through the media, such as a commercial in between plays in the Seahawks vs. Packers game (GO HAWKS), your company actually becomes the media. ***Mind Blown*** With that said, I would highly recommend that you keep reading, and take notes.

As you know, the traditional way of lead generation and sales process has changed immensely. People don’t want to be sold too, they gather the information that they want, when they want, from who they want. They get recommendations from friends, they search the web for answers to their problems, they post on social media, and so forth. These people already have an opinion on your brand before you even market to them, and they probably don’t know there difference between your brand, and your competitors. Before I even viewed the image that Mr. Abloh posted on his Instagram, I didn’t know the difference between Beats by Dre, Bose, and Sennheiser. I saw them as being quite equal. I knew that some Beats by Dre tended to market towards the younger generation, while Bose and Sennheiser was for the more classy individual, who tends to be in an older age group. For companies that are looking to stand out among their competition,  they need to exercise content marketing.

Companies need to recognize that content marketing is VERY effective. A component of content marketing is teaching. When you are creating compelling content that speaks to the customers needs, answers their needs, and informs them why they need this particular product, you are teaching them instead of pitching. Once you have taught them, they view your company as having authority, which consumers love, because it gives them a feeling of reassurance that your product was the right choice for them.

A key component of content marketing is that you are giving away your compelling content for free, and not paying for marketing elsewhere. Obviously this is a lot cheaper, and in the long run more effective. The longer that you create compelling content, the more reliable, and authentic you come off among your prospective buyers. In result, Google recognizes this, and places your blog, or site at the top of its search results. Google also ranks the writer that is writing the content, this is called AuthorRank.

Many companies fall to a dilemma, that I like to think of as the three dragons vs. the three-headed dragon. Take for instance the three dragons situation, these three dragons named, Content, Social Media, and SEO are all flying to this village to burn it down because they don’t like how they are being treated by the village people. While they are flying, Content gets tired, and decides that he wants to stop and take a nap. Now there is only two dragons flying to the village. Then all of a sudden, what do you know, Social Media gets hungry, so he decides to stray from the mission and go find some live-stock to BBQ, now you are only left with one dragon, SEO. SEO gets to the village and ultimately gets killed because he didn’t have backup from his dragon friend’s Content, and Social Media. Whereas if they were morphed together, they would have been able to get to the village all together, and use three times the fire to take down the village. People tend to think of content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization as three different categories that if you perform each one individually, then you will get a positive result. When in actuality, you need to morph all three of those categories together because each component plays off of each other.

Content

The foundation element is of course, content. This content has to be effective though. The content speaks to the audience, answers the audience’s questions, informs the audience, and teaches them. It must make them want to step away from their lives to give your product a chance. You want to create audience-focused content as if social media and search engines don’t exist. Give it your all when it comes to speaking to them.

Social

If you are able to perform effective social media marketing then it will lead to content distribution. This is what social media hubs are all about! People love compelling content, so compelling that they feel the need to share it to all 800+ of their friends. The people who are able to create compelling content are constantly having their content shared, and are the social media king’s and queen’s. When people share your content, Google gets notified, and it registers to them that it is in fact, high quality content.

Search

This is the last component that you need to master. When you are creating content, you are writing it for the people who will love it. These people give your company that positive reassurance by sharing it on social media platforms, linking it to their blogs, and content sites. Google takes all of this information in and if you’re a company that demonstrates authenticity, high-value, authority, and something that people want to see when they search Google, they place you at the top of the page. With that said, you still need to tweak the way you deliver your information, so that Google will in fact be notified that you are worthy of being ranked higher than your competitors. For instance, if you are talking about outbound marketing and instead of using the words outbound marketing in your text, you are calling it OldLawn marketing because it is ugly and dead. This would be quite funny, and your viewers might think the same, but good wouldn’t understand it. Google is smart, but not human smart.

As a marketer, you need to step into the shoes of your audience. If they are on Facebook talking to friends, they are not in the “buy-buy-buy-buy” mood. They are in the socialize mood. You as a marketer need to figure out a way to get into their conversations, so that they can relate to you as a company. Content marketing is an audience building path, not necessarily a conversion-to-customer path.

Since I like to consider myself a “Smarketer”, which is a smart marketer, I naturally like to continue to expand my knowledge on topics pertaining to marketing. Which is why I went over to the website of Content Marketing Institute, and read an article titled, The 5 Pillars of Successful Content Marketing. I encourage you all to read this article as well. One thing that really stood out to me in this article, was that 2 million blog posts are being posted everyday. Which is slightly discouraging considering that this blog post will be one in two million posts today. But you can view it as a competition. You want your creative, compelling content to be heard right? Well, practice the techniques that I have talked about, and see if you can beat out your competition, and ask yourself……

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