With every business from private to public to non-profit, including tourism organizations, producing more content today than they did last year, it is important for marketers to understand the difference between content and content marketing. Everyone is creating content. But with content marketing, you’re attracting an audience to a brand-owned destination versus interrupting an audience on another platform. Many businesses are creating content that supports the brand or products they sell, not because it meets the customers need. The problem with most of this content is that it isn’t created for the audience you are trying to reach, engage and convert. Stop creating content that sells. Stop creating campaigns that have a short shelf life. Start creating content that is helpful and lasts more than your traditional campaigns. Create evergreen content that can be used over time.
Today’s marketers are creating content and telling stories but are they just create content and hoping that customers find them or is it part of their overall content marketing strategy? Content marketing is designed and developed for marketing purposes, and not for wider company initiatives, be it internal or external. This content addresses various segments at the different stages of the purchase funnel. You content calendar will align with sales, customers, products, and other externally focused initiatives. Both types of content must align and have the same voice, tone, look, feel, consistency and brand guidelines, no matter how broadly or narrowly focused.
In my opinion, I have noticed that many marketers are easily confusing content with content marketing. Content marketing is a strategic solution to a strategic problem. To reach and engage new customers, you have to create content that people actually want. To do that I believe, as a marketer, you need to take an audience-first approach to your storytelling. That will build a loyal audience, keep consumers coming back to your site and increasing your organic search traffic. The destination is the real difference between content and content marketing.
Tips To Build An Effective Content Marketing Destination
Determine your Content Marketing mission statement
This mission statement should support your brand mission and put your customers as its focus. The first thing you need to be doing is defining who your target audience is, what your topics are and what value you intend to provide your customers.
Commit to Publishing on a Regular Basis
You can read more about why I feel your organization should blog regularly. When I worked at a CVB as a destination marketer, I was publishing content 3 times a week. I believe that you should pick a minimum of 3 topics and publish 3 times a week on those categories of content that will attract the right audience.
Define Your Measurement Metrics
Before starting any type of campaign you should put metrics in place to determine the success of your marketing efforts. The key metrics to look at are traffic (visits, unique visitors and page views), engagement (social shares, comments, likes, time on site, and social referral traffic), and conversions (email subscribers and contact form submissions). You can read more about important Google Analytics you should track.
Create Visual Content to Support Your Content Strategy
Content Marketing isn’t just about posting text, it must also include visual content. That is anything from stunning photography, compelling videos, or curating Instagram photos on your website. With the evolution of Social Media, it is imperative that organizations invest in quality imagery. When you create a video and post it to YouTube or Facebook, you should automatically create a blog post to go along with it and have the video embedded in the post. Invest in imagery to support your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing and storytelling are as old as us, and something marketers have been doing since the beginning of time. We have always had to find ways to convey information that useful and entertaining, that our customers are looking for. The ideas laid out above as just the tip of the iceberg to build a content marketing destination to reach, engage, convert new customers and retain current customers for your business.
