Studio Hyperset

Because of rapid technological developments and changing consumer behavior, marketing strategists have found it necessary, in recent years, to adjust their tactics. The days of cold calling, mailing fliers, and running ads in industry publications are over. And as we enter the new year, it’s clear one strategic question has replaced all these outdated techniques:

How do targeted consumer segments want to be reached?

While the platforms consumers prefer vary widely — Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, news sites, entertainment franchises — customers do provide a single, consistent answer to the question above:

Whatever the platform, we want you to reach us with engaging, informative, and entertaining content.

What is content marketing?

At a high level, we might say mass media marketing and traditional, SEO-/PPC-driven online marketing hope to attract the one by shouting at the many. Content marketing works quite a bit differently. We might say it attracts the many by whispering to the one.

That is, we create content for an idealized demographic type (a “buyer persona”), use highly personal channels to share this content with individuals who fit this type (via email, social media, etc.), and build awareness and interest from the individual up (rather than from the group down).

Using content marketing, SH helps businesses build, activate, and manage reliable, scalable, and measurable frameworks that allow our clients to:

• connect with new leads
• transform these leads into an audience
• engage this audience with content
• use awareness to increase revenue opportunities

From Studio Hyperset’s perspective, there are no buyers, customers, or users. There are only audiences and the content that engages them. And given increased consumer apathy for traditional marketing methods, content marketing helps businesses reach potential customers while also gaining their trust and loyalty.

According to Hubspot (an inbound marketing solution for businesses), content marketing focuses on creating valuable content on social media, blogs, videos, images, and other platforms. Effective content marketing should focus on three main components: attracting an audience, exchanging traditional advertising for native content, and analyzing engagement and conversion metrics.

The first of these is the core of content marketing, but it is often not taken seriously enough.

Just as a brick-and-mortar store might attract target customers via captivating and appealing displays, your website and its content should have a similar attractiveness to your target market, especially as online shopping continues to increase in popularity. In a world where businesses shout for attention, understanding your audience, their buying needs, as well as their place in your customer lifecycle will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and gain the customer’s trust.

Only when you truly understand your audience can you “go native.” With valuable content created for your audience, you can build, engage, and delight your audience much like a novel or a play. A greater understanding of your audience can help you figure out which types of content they prefer to engage with: infographics, videos, white papers, &c.

Also consider that many businesses face an important “marketing skills gap.”

In a 2012 article on the Oracle blog, 75% of marketers say their lack of skills is impacting revenue in some way, and 74% say it’s contributing to a misalignment between the marketing and sales teams. According to Forbes, for many businesses, outsourcing these duities to a marketing agency is a great way to close the skills gap. Doing so allows them to both produce optimal content for their audience and receive more expertise for less than it costs to operate an employee team.

But understanding your audience and creating content for them is useless without analyzing the results. Content marketing involves a constant cycle of research, content creation, and analyzing data. Analyzing campaign results helps you understand your audience better, anticipate their needs, and investigate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of your efforts. Monitoring your competitors’ online marketing efforts can also help you spot industry trends or spark new ideas. Tools like our analysis and reporting service can deliver such information right to your inbox.

While entering the world of content marketing will differentiate you from your competitors, more importantly, it will allow you to connect with your audience more intimately. By understanding your audience and its needs, you can create educational content for them, understand how their needs might change in the future, and engage them in sustained, immediate ways.