Real-Time Content Marketing and Digital Marketing - Essay Example

The whitepaper presents a collection of opinions, insights, and experiences from digital marketing experts. Mathew Sweezey offers insights into how modern marketers can thrive by maintaining relevance and agility. As marketing channels increase, the key lies in engaging continuously with automated, mobile, and social marketing. Josh Miles says that B2B marketers should persevere when initial digital marketing attempts fail. He advises that creating successful digital marketing requires identification of what the marketer wants to make, finding the right recipe, collecting the different ingredients, making digital marketing, and exploring new channels. Next, David DeVore notes the importance of identifying fans and amplifying the digital brand. Some important objectives in this case include provision of relevant and useful content to engage fans, using email to share previous content with fans, and enlisting the help of brand fans. Rishi Shah identifies the shares five steps that digital marketers can use to grow their email lists successfully. These include offering gifts to website visitors in exchange for their email address, offering relevant gifts, creating their own unique gifts, hosting their files, and collecting leads. Jen Ribbie observes that content marketing does not have to be an expensive undertaking. She picks out commitment to content, using engaging, entertaining and/or educational content, recycling success stories in other formats, involving the audience, and focus on quality as key to creating content. Phil Daniels suggests that responsive design is essential to ensuring user-friendly experience on the mobile browser. To develop a responsive site, sufficient investment, strategic planning around the organization and content, enhancing technical support, and monitoring mobile trends on the site are necessary. Aaron Lee talks states that mobile phones have become a major communication tool, as shown in figure 1. about how social media can help brands gain a competitive edge by listening and responding to consumer expectations, creating trust, value, and community around their brand, and personalizing the consumer’s experience. The email list is important in deepening relationships with the consumer. The data collected from the digital marketing audience should be used to create value by turning it into smart data. The data can be used to improve the brand’s engagement, meaning, and relevance to the consumer in their online experience, email correspondence, and advertising. Trevor Yager urges digital marketers to identify the client’s specific needs. Marketers should ask customers about their interests to better understand and connect with them, set up a CRM system, integrate the CRM system with the best available multi-channel marketing platform, seek feedback, and persevere. Kyle Lacey opines that despite consumers having similar options in brand communicating, they eventually determine the right channel for their communication needs. This decision is influenced by the marketing message content, immediacy needs of the message, formality required by the message, and initiation of communication. The preferred channels of communication are shown in figure 2. For the non-profit organization, attention needs to be on the most productive priorities. Digital marketing requires identification of key audiences, needs required most from the organization, what the organization wants from the audience, and how digital marketing can add value to enhance engagement with audiences. The amount of data that an organization receives from their audience can be problematic, especially during analysis. To avoid this, Andy Perez advises digital marketers to use big data tactfully by identifying only relevant data, narrowing the scope of big data questions, and cooperative data from different data points. Adam Wexler identifies the importance of digital marketing to connect brands and audiences, specifically using the direct message function on Twitter that is a consolidated form of the email inbox. Communication with the brand’s audience can be personalized and customized to share offers with consumers. Brad Cohen identifies social profile data as crucial in understanding who the customers are and their occupations. To combine profile information and specialized data, the marketer should create email campaigns and content using available profile data; refine their data by analyzing email responses against profile data, and seeking to increase registrations actively from identified valuable and preferred target groups. Finally, Sim Jenkins offers insight into the importance of making the email program mobile-friendly through campaign management, creative coding and design, and strategic planning. Failure to mobilize the organization’s email campaign will disadvantage the brand, especially where emails are not standardized to mobile browsers. Growth in Ownership of Mobile Phones between 2011 and 2013 (Hepburn 1) Figure 1: Growth in Ownership of Mobile Phones between 2011 and 2013 Consumer Channel Usage Preferred Channels for receiving promotional information from companies with permission to do so Overall 15-17 yrs 18-24 yrs 25-34 yrs 35-44 yrs 45-54 yrs 55-64 yrs Over 65 yrs Email 77% 66 74 75 81 79 81 79 Direct mail 9% 6 6 6 9 10 14 14 Text messaging 5% 10 5 7 4 6 1 0 FaceBook 4% 8 7 3 4 3 1 0 Telephone 2% 0 5 3 2 1 1 2 Twitter 1% 4 1 1 0 0 0 0 Mobile App 1% 2 1 1 0 1 0 0 LinkedIn 0% 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 (McGee 1) Figure 2: Consumer usage of specific channels of communication with the brand One company that has successfully used digital marketing as part of its overall marketing plan is Sears Holding, which has specifically utilized content marketing. In order to get consumers to notice their content, Sears Holdings uses several means to connect its audience with their content. For their online fitness community, FitStudio, Sears Holdings uses a number of fitness experts to create their content (Garner 32). These experts reach out to various wellness communities, drawing them to the content produced by FitStudio. By leveraging several online platforms like Shop Your Way, Pintrest, Twitter, and FaceBook, they are able to promote the content generated by the organization. Moreover, they also use traditional marketing assets to notify their customers about the activities at FitStudio. Because they have a rich fitness content library, Sears Holdings is able to leverage service that enable consumers select their content from different portal links online (Garner 32). Although FitStudio is a fundamental part of Sears Holdings content marketing undertakings, it is but one of several multi-channel programs at Sears. As far as their ROI related metrics for their content marketing efforts are concerned, success is measured based on the specific program. For some programs, the organization measures page views, membership engagement and acquisition, purchases, coupon redemption, and return visits (Garner 33). Majority of such metrics are used to feed into the value of engaged consumer equations, ultimately determining the ROI. Sears Holdings is one of the biggest retailers of products related to fitness. Their brand has played an important role in consumers’ conversations regarding how to get fit and in shape, as well as how fitness should be a part of all people’s lives. The organization realized that consumers came to their stores for fitness equipment to get in shape and fitter. While the equipment was an important part of their process, Sears Holdings decided to begin providing motivation and information about living healthier lives through digital platforms (Garner 33). The perfect solution was FitStudio, providing expert advice from nutritionists and fitness professionals. FitStudio also provided a social venue for the consumers to connect with one another, as well as with the fitness professionals and nutritionists, to receive encouraging and informational content. While the brand had long been associated with selling fitness equipment, identifying their consumer’s needs for fitness and nutritional advice and marketing this content to them online enabled them extend their brand beyond the sale of equipment (Gutman 1). Today, because of their content marketing strategy, Sears Holding is known for their know-how and motivation on how to get America into shape as well. Their discovery platform for content known as Outbrain has worked extensively with various organizations on Fortune 500 for their expert advice, which they used to enrich their content with expert advice. Outbrain has taken Sears Holdings to another level as it continues to lead a significantly successful content marketing campaign. As a brand that is investing substantially in content marketing, Sears Holdings understands that attracting as many consumers as possible to interact and engage with their content will aid in creating brand affinity and brand awareness, while also playing a leading role in their social and SEO strategies (Gutman 1). By creating a robust strategy for content marketing, Sears Holdings is hoping to go beyond optimizing the content for SEO or posting content to Twitter, FaceBook and other social channels (Gutman 1). As a result, the organization will seek to expand their reach, accounting for their partnership with Outbrain that has a performance-based, efficient purchasing model. However, it does not always make sense for start-up brands to set out their content marketing campaign by forming partnerships with such specialty organizations like Outbrain. In order to get started on their own, such the brand managers of such companies should begin by thinking about the type of content that best informs and/or entertains their audience. In this case, this would involve content that is interesting enough for the consumer to share with their peers and friends online. Thus, it is alright to begin small and getting consumers to discover the content an organization is offering as they develop it, getting essential insights from the audience on their preferences, likes, interest, and other important information (Kopp, Digital Marketing Town Hall). Works Cited Garner, Rob. Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2014. Internet resource Gutman, Brandon. GE, General Mills And Sears Explain Their Success In Content Marketing. 16 May 2012. 15 November 2014 . Hepburn, Aden. Infographic: 2013 Mobile Growth Statistics. 1 October 2013. 15 November 2014 . Kopp, Tim, ed. Digital Marketing Town Hall. Indianapolis: ExactTarget, 2014. Online Resource McGee, Matt. 77 Percent of Us Want To Get Marketing Messages via Email & There’s No Close Second Place, Study Says. 5 April 2012. 15 November 2014 . Read More