29 Jun The Secret to Getting Your Message Out
Every Sunday, your pastor gives a quality, important sermon. Every year, your association hosts a high-energy, informative convention. Every day, your company shows off its innovative, life-altering products. So, how do you get the word out about your organization? Try something called content marketing.
Content marketing flips the traditional method of pushing people into action and instead aims to serve them. A study by The Manifest, reports that 53% of businesses participate in content marketing today. It’s grown in popularity for a few reasons.
- Today’s audiences have outsmarted the old marketing tactics. Between the ability to learn anything through the internet and generations growing up learning to ignore traditional commercials, it’s no wonder they don’t connect with push marketing tactics.
- The use of adblock has exploded to 615 million devices in 2017, up 30% from 2016, according to PageFair. People don’t want to see ads, and they’re taking action to avoid them.
- Marketing channels have been way oversaturated. Take direct mail–when companies first discovered the potential of mailing prospective customers, they sent letters in droves. Nowadays when people receive “junk mail” they take it directly from the mailbox to the trash can. The same thing has happened with online advertising. Banner ads cover almost every inch of white space on the screen, and thirty-second ads precede almost every video. Research by Nielson and Sharethrough shows that traditional banner ads are ineffective, and Google reports that they have a click-through rate of just 0.06%. The science may be on the side of content marketing, but the most compelling evidence is a big company putting its money on it, with P&G cutting spending on digital banner ads by $100 million in 2017.
Content marketing is a byproduct of the rise of social media and the above factors. When people spend their time online, they expect it to be valuable. This means that your online content needs to be entertaining, educational, or create some emotion. Your content should have a job that it fulfills for anyone that comes across it, as Buzzfeed publisher Dao Nguyen discuss in this TED Talk. Making high-quality content that brings value to someone is the key to content marketing.
It may seem like content marketing is just turning everyone into a blogger, but it has many concrete benefits for any organization’s goals. Content marketing builds loyalty and increases conversions. According to inPowered, expert content is 88% more effective than branded content and increased people’s consideration of purchasing by 38%. Content marketing is also great for building a relationship of trust. It shows your audience that you are legitimate and an expert in your domain. It is also an opportunity to construct an image. Are you a community-focused church who posts video montages and interviews congregation members? Or are you a quirky startup who makes short comic sketches around your product? Content marketing is the perfect strategy for building an image with a purpose.
Content marketing has one other major advantage, and that is SEO. Search engine optimization is the organic way to boost a website’s search engine ranking. This is incredibly important, because according to FleishmanHillard 89% of consumers use search engines to make purchasing decisions. Content marketing is one of the best ways to optimize your SEO. Google rewards quality, consistent content, and a study conducted by Forrester Research found that websites with videos were 50 times more likely to make it to the front page of Google than those without videos.
Video is one of the best mediums for content marketing. In a study by aimClear, search results with videos had a 41% higher click-through rate than plain-text sites. Videos are more interactive and communicate more personality than text. To learn how to make good videos for your website, check out this MediaFusion blog post.
One step beyond video is live streaming. Streaming is exploding in popularity, with records being broken all the time. Most recently, the record was broken by the World Cup with a concurrent viewership of 7.7 million, as measured by Conviva.
One of the best ways to ensure a successful live stream is to consider the factor that Dao Nguyen emphasized as the key to live streaming in her previously mentioned TED Talk, “the shared anticipation of something about to happen.” This is what makes live sports more entertaining than reruns. In her TED Talk, Nguyen relates how 800,000 people watched live as two people in hazmat suits wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded. Imagine if you got 800,000 people live and engaged with your brand and your content. Imagine if you could do that monthly or weekly. This is the power of content marketing combined with live video.
Now experiment on your own, starting with Facebook Live. Try streaming how long it takes to break your product, or a five-minute daily prayer to keep your congregation engaged all week. Experience the power of live video content marketing, but there are first a few things to note:
- A study by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Akamai Technologies found that 40% of people will leave a site if the video takes more than ten seconds to load, so you need your systems running smoothly and quickly at all times. If you want this guarantee, you need to manage your content on your own website.
- It is helpful for SEO to self-host your video content, according to Neil Patel.
- If you use platforms like YouTube or Facebook, they own all content you stream through them.
If you are ready to take the next step and host your on-demand and live video content on your own website as well as Facebook and YouTube, or want to do live video on something other than your phone, consider contacting us today.
More Resources
What is con-tent marketing: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/
More statistics about SEO and video: 6-cool-stats-about-video-seo
The Secret Guide to Video and SEO: https://neilpatel.com/blog/guide-to-video-seo/