If the murmurings on the interwebs are to be believed, middle-American basket-weavers’ favourite new blogging platform – yes, Pinterest - is driving more referral traffic than Google Plus, Linkedin and Youtube combined!

For those who are unfamiliar with Pinterest, it is a rapidly-growing  social network with a very simple premise: users share (or, ‘pin’) photos that they find online on their own virtual bulletin board. You can follow friends on Pinterest and “repin” things that they have already pinned on your Pinterest boards or browse a live feed of items that are being pinned by strangers when you’re searching for inspiration.

Simples.

It might sound a bit ‘niche’, but the stats cannot be ignored and, unsurprisingly, brands are starting to adopt content marketing strategies to capitalise on the hyper-shareable features of Pinterest.

If you are considering adopting Pinterest as a platform for content marketing, here are some ideas and examples that should get some ideas going:

• Don’t just pin your products, pin your audience’s interests

People don’t like being sold to unless they are in the market to buy. However, they will give a brand its time if it shares content that is engaging or useful.  Whole Foods (below) has created entire boards of gorgeous and novel foods from around the world, for food-lovers to enjoy. If you are a hotel, why not pin pictures of nearby sites, destinations and recommended entertainment and dining venues. A fashion label? Then you could dedicate boards to trends, colours and fabrics, like Kate Spade NYC has done.

• Run a Pinterest competition encouraging people to re-pin branded content

The fashion label, Land’s End, ran a ‘Pin It and Win It’ competition whereby people were asked to pin up to 20 images from the Land’s End site or the Land’s End Pinterest page. Then all you had to do was email a URL of your pinboard to Land’s End to be entered. There were about 200 boards developed for the contest and the viral nature of Pinterest meant that Land’s End products reached thousands of Pinterest users.

• Curate charts and infographics that show relevant and useful statistics for your industry (for more on content curation, go here)

A really good example of this is Mashable’s infographics board which shows how you can group together visual content.

Mashable drive traffic to their content by pinning a compelling photo to a themed board, which drives traffic to the post where the photo originated. They also include a caption (at the bottom of each pic) that piques your interest, motivating you to actually click through the photo to the on-site post.

• Create and order your videos to tell a story

Most major brands have an archive of tv commercials and marketing videos uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo. By curating them on a Pinterest board, brands can create an attractive portal of both old and new footage which can tell the brand story.

Content Marketing and Pinterest: the Bottom Line

Sites like Pinterest reward brands that adopt a content marketing mindset and are committed to producing engaging and plentiful content that creates a community and ultimately attracts and convert them to customers.

If you are interested in learning more about content marketing, or how our platform will enable you to de-risk your content marketing – please do get in touch.

For those who don't 'do' opera, insert: "iPad2"

For far too long, agencies – who have secured the dubious honour of comandeering client Facebook pages – have used unimaginative weekly competitions (with uninspired prizes), to reach their engagement KPi’s for the month (i.e. get 5,000 more fans).

Free product for the cost of a ‘Like’? – BAM – arbitary engagement stats hit. Simples.

Let’s ignore for the moment that these kinds of competitions are a violation  Facebook’s competition rules. My major problem with these pervasive competitions is that this is the kind of ‘fan’ they create:

FB competitions create opportunistic 'fans' who have no intention of sticking around for 'conversation' and 'engagement'

In offline terms, a brand’s Facebook competition is the equivalent of a camera shop-owner whose shop is subjected to a flash-mob of looters. Once the requisite number of unsecured cameras have been taken, everyone leaves until the next day/week/month when another chance to get a free camera arises.

How many of these people will return to the store to buy something in the meantime? Or, care to learn more about the store, the store-owner and his wares? A few maybe – but good luck convincing yourself that people garnered in this fashion are sincere brand ambassadors or fans or member participants or whatever the hip nomenclature of the day is.

The problem is that a Facebook competition does not build a relationship with your audience members. It is simply a crude, call-to-action to anyone on Facebook at the right time with a  ‘what can I get for the least amount of effort’ mentality.

Content Marketing – a solution to your Facebook competition malaise

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content, to attract and engage a defined, target audience, with a clear, commercial objective (for a comprehensive intro to content marketing, go here)

• New content – on whichever channel it is published – rewards and encourages recurring visits. Think of articles on sites that pique your interest – you dwell on the page and then you explore the site for other articles of interest. Occasionally, you bookmark the site so that you can return to it return later, or you sign-up to a newsletter so you can continue to receive its content.
• Content is shareable, competitions are not. The very nature of social networks means that content is meant to be seen, shared and percolated through the networks of others as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Unless it is an imperative of a competition’s rules, noone ever shares a competition – why would you do that and reduce the chances of you winning? Let’s face it, people are much much much more likely to share a brand’s content if it relevant, entertaining or useful, than they are a status update that says ‘Tell us your favourite film and win a DVD’. Content goes viral, competitions don’t.
• Content has longevity, competitions are time-sensitive. Competitions are invariably within a ‘limited time only’; 24hrs, a week or as long as it takes brand planners to think of something else to wow the client. By contrast, content is indexed by Facebook’s internal search engines, meaning that any brand content shared remains ‘front of mind’ when a person next uses the search bar (it appears under ‘shared links’).
• Click-through: If a brand is committed to content marketing then the content it shares on Facebook will always be from the brand’s own site. This keeps the reader within the brand’s online ecosystem be it on Facebook or a brand site.

To return to the analogy of the beleaguered shop-owner:

Imagine now that the shop owner begins to put out in his store different articles about cameras; photos taken with various camera, camera product info, interviews with famous photographers, how-to guides etc. People turn up regularly to browse and to read. They spend time in the shop, and the owner can begin to talk to them, find out more about them – individually – learn about their tastes from what they’re reading.  He can then even make recommendations based on what he’s learnt…

If you provide content, customers and prospects will dwell for longer, share it and most likely return to make a purchase!

This surely facilitates a much richer, long-term relationship with the brand, rather than adhering to a repetitive (and unimaginative) competition-driven model to stimulate engagement spikes. This is what happens when brands and agencies  adopt a content marketing mindset that supports their social media efforts.

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idio helps major brands grow, track and convert their social media communities through intelligent content marketing solutions. If you’re not sure where to start with content marketing for your social media brands, do get in touch.

Marketing firm Eloqua, whose clients include Ellie Mae, Sony, McAfee, and Wisdom Tree, hired a journalist for their content marketing in 2010. Eloqua, despite being a marketing firm for other companies, was lacking in their own content and their blog was suffering from too low of postings and not being properly indexed. To fix this issue, Eloqua hired journalist Jesse Noyes, who previously worked for The Boston Herald.

After hiring Noyes, Eloqua saw double the unique visitors, an improvement in revenue for Q1 and Q2, and their blog even won an award. All because of hiring a journalist to create their content.

It’s not just marketing firms wising up to the prospect of hiring a journalist: huge tech companies like Google are also recruiting journalists for their own content marketing and research departments. Former social media writer over at CNET, Caroline McCarthy, now works for Google. And we are seeing an increased trend of consumer brands hiring journalists to tell their story (its really worth a read of this post for some great examples).

Journalists are already taught the importance of quality content and possess the very important skill set of information gathering, proper research, and implementation. While marketing professionals may seem like a good idea, someone with an editorial background can make a superb addition to your marketing team.

Here is some advice Brian Kardon of Eloqua originally shared on Eloqua’s blog, after hiring their journalist:

• The journalist isn’t a marketer, and therefore has better scrutiny over what will resonate with readers. Also, don’t pressure the journalist to sell something–let them create a story for your company.
• The journalist is indeed part of the team, make them feel at home and integrate all of their ideas with the marketing team’s strategies.
• Measure every bit of content and make sure your content marketing is keeping numbers high. Although, a journalist can find this to be easy work.

The modern day journalist uses a range of tools, for search and trend discovery, curation, writing, multi-channel publishing, and measurement. And the more progressive companies are investing in toolkits that do multiple of the above, so that their content marketing can be more integrated and measurable.

Building this competency into your marketing team is vital, as content creation and curation takes a fundamental role in modern day marketing.

The state of eCRM

Felix points out that the foundation of eCRM, your customers, is above all else the most important thing and will continue to be important in the future. Companies should strive to make sure customer loyalty is met and they continue to see brand loyalty even after implementing new strategies. Limited resources, Felix says, usually get in the way of the company-customer relationship, however. But, there are ways around that.

All customers are different and so are their loyalty. That is why companies must be prepared for all sorts of different sets of loyalty and how a customer interacts with your brand. Keeping a constant watch on how loyalty is shifting and customer needs are changing is the best bet for a business, and shifting your budget accordingly will see the best results. Simple enough, right?

What to consider

Segmentation, or making sure customers are most responsive to something they like, is the best thing a business can do right now. Personalization of content means making sure everybody sees what they want to see, whether it is in an email or otherwise. Segmenting different customer bases is best. Going ahead in the future, all businesses should consider segmentation.

For example, a golf enthusiast is going to respond positively to a branded email with a golfing promotion, whereas a cricket player won’t be so thrilled to receive that same email. Make sure to make separate specials for your different bases of customers, because that means higher retention and loyalty.

Once customers are segmented into their likes and preferences, a brand can start building a campaign from that. One example is when McCain Foods utilized this and created special discounts for customers based on their personal needs as well as sending content without a straight forward marketing message–like a coloring page for the kids to work on. Building from that, companies can engage and further their value to the customer.

De-risking your strategy

Before jumping head on into all of this, Felix reminds people to do “nudges,” or take small steps for the best results. Budgeting for all of these things can seem a bit overwhelming, which is why it is suggested to follow through a few steps to “de-risk” a strategy.

For de-risking, a company should:

• Audit: Prioritized quick wins, as it is put. These are the strategies that will be used and implemented, and prior plans will be used as a value marker.
• Plan: Now it’s time to plan out the strategies accordingly. When proposing these plans and budgeting, this second step of planning can also be used as the pitch to managers.
• Roll out: It’s time to put in pilot programs and start testing the waters!

With a step-by-step approach, there will be a lot lower risk of failure. The economy is still in a recession and that means risks from failed plans have higher stakes. Implementing a stepped eCRM strategy to boost customer retention and loyalty is the safest bet during these harder economic times.

Takeaways

• The future of eCRM for any business is going to be based on content and engagement.
• Businesses should segment customers into smaller demographics that can be easily targeted with personalized content.
• Instead of lumping everything together, make it into a step-by-step process to reduce risk of failure.

Felix Velarde is Founder and Managing Director of leading eCRM strategy company, Underwired, and he is also the Course Leader for eCRM at the Institute of Digital and Direct Marketing. We caught up with Felix recently after our January Brand Breakfast, at which he was a speaker. Here are the key points:

On eCRM

• Customer engagement is centred on increased understanding of consumers in a way that allows better engagement with them through digital channels.
• Such understanding of people goes beyond behaviour and demographics but the needs, attitudes and motivations of customers.
• Know their motivations, and you know how to create power to build lasting relationships with them.

On Content Marketing and eCRM

• The problem with eCRM is that with so much ‘understanding’, comes the increased requirement to find new ways to engage with customers.
• Content becomes critical – particularly RIGHT content.
• Right content serves the customer at the right time, when it is most relevant and valuable. This will in turn increase the customer’s evolution process towards your brand.

On Content Strategy

• Having a content strategy means having the ability to serve content accurately to the customer at the customer journey stage they’re at.
• Interestingly, this can differ from day to day.
• Brands have to accept and work with the realization that having the right content, technology and ability to a successful content strategy is challenging.
• Get the challenge right and relationships become altogether more purposeful.

What happened

Tesco, which is renowned for its collection and detailed use of customer data via its incredibly strong loyalty programme, the Club Card. With the Club Card, Tesco is able to direct better savings and a more targeted experience to loyal customers because they can collect purchase history. This last Christmas, Tesco stepped into a price war and created a campaign called the “Big Price Drop“. However, in order to initiate the Big Price Drop campaign, Tesco took away some privileges that customers got with their Club Card.

Tesco lost loyalty, as customers felt the impact of the company sidestepping their longstanding data marketing plan which rewarded valuable customers, whilst collecting detailed information on their purchasing in order to deliver targeted offers and better overall service. An insider for the company was cited as saying that Tesco “lost sight of the one [thing] which it has got over its rivals,” That, of course, being information and insight into customer purchase history.

Apparently, Tesco boss Philip Clarke has now conceded it was a major mistake to remove the  Tesco Clubcard coupon mailing and has confirmed it will be put back into the programme as part of a strategic overhaul following the disastrous Christmas results. Indeed one Tesco source is quoted as saying: “The lack of coupons was an own goal. It looks with the benefit of hindsight to have been a tactical error in not posting out Clubcard coupons this time round, which was probably done to offset the cost of the Big Price Drop campaign. Philip and his team is almost certain to reverse the move.”

Why data marketing is important

Companies of all kinds can learn from Tesco’s mistake. Data marketing is an integral tool that helps a company tap into a customer’s thought process, motivation, and context. It can help benefit rewards systems like the Club Card, which will retain more loyal customers in the long run. The price war and giving everyone who shops at Tesco price cuts meant more people in the immediate, but hurt the brand’s relationship with its most valuable customers.

So what can we learn NOT to do? Here are some pointers:

• Analyze your data carefully–what does your customer want? How can you make it happen to keep them happy?
• When thinking of scrapping certain privileges, make sure you are caring for your most valuable customers.
• Remember that loyalty and retention are usually of primary importance, ahead of trying to attract new buyers with a marketing campaign that will hurt your original customers.

Tesco will be returning to their roots, so to speak, by going back to collecting useful customer data to keep their competitive edge. However, it will take them quite an effort to get back to their original stock price.

• Becoming an integral part of any CMO’s strategy
• Making businesses make the shift from traditional advertising to content marketing
• Starting to give a higher return of investment (ROI) than traditional ways.

While everyone can talk about the positives about content marketing, what about the numbers? Will your content marketing ROI make a difference?

The numbers and case studies

According to the Custom Content Council, in 2012, 68% of CMO’s will be increasing their budget for content marketing. More than half of businesses will be focusing on content rather than traditional marketing and advertising to sell their products. Content is starting to become a heavy contender for selling: as Seth Godin puts it: “Content marketing is the only marketing left.”

Stats from Custom Content Council

Big and small companies alike are seeing the shift, though the numbers see a higher percentage of allocated budgets toward content marketing in smaller companies–in fact, 34% of a company’s budget with ten or less employees goes toward content marketing.

Companies with 1,000 or more employees are at 26% currently. That means a small company is spending around $56,000 (see above) in total in content marketing and a larger company is spending up to $1,000,000 on a campaign. All for content!

Through content, companies are able to tell a story. Instead of relying on 30-second advertisements, billboards, or radio spots, the Internet and other multi-media outlets allow companies to really build story, connecting with people in new and innovative ways. There are dozens of examples: GE, L’Oreal, American Express, Red Bull, and General Mills. All of these major companies have taken the shift from traditional marketing to creating quality, engaged content that sees a high return for their content marketing ROI.

Redbull Magazine Screenshot

Specifically, companies like Red Bull or L’Oreal are utilizing a multi-channel content approach–they are using all resources in order to build better trust and a story with their consumers. Red Bull hosts dozens of extreme sports contests, which have become quite popular and even earn themselves spots on television like a normal sports game. L’Oreal uses the power of sharing and teaching through their website Makeup.com to teach women how to do different make-up looks while also selling their products in a non-intrusive way.

Other examples include American Express and their Open Forum website, which is targeted at small businesses or General Mills and their Tablespoon website which shares recipes with consumers. All of these methods are perfect examples of content marketing working.

Questions about content marketing ROI

So, your business is thinking about content marketing to achieve business goals. ROI can be a tricky thing, and a regular question is how content can retain more customers, increase revenues, and reduce costs.

'Understand your purpose' Stats from Custom Content Council

Building a content campaign is more than just publishing great content. Brand awareness, engagement, customer loyalty, and even website traffic are to be considered. Essentially, companies must understand their purpose (see left) and why they want to create this content.

Editor for Comcast Interactive, Sam Slaughter, gives an excellent example: He says businesses should keep tabs on content users “very closely” from how they consume content or buy a product. “From there,” he says “We can often come up with an actual dollar value from that piece of content.”

Other companies like Best Western did exactly that. They customized the experience for each customer, doubly so in their rewards program, and saw an increase of 278% ROI and a 30% increase in revenue from each customer.

Of course, all of these success stories don’t happen over night. ROI is achieved through patience. Much like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger said,

“Building blogs is like building muscles. Great content properties, like muscles, take patience.”

And it is true, consistently using content takes patience, but will see a high ROI and increase in marketing. We recommend that the minimum period for measuring ROI on a new content marketing strategy should be 6 months, although sometimes value is seen in as little as 3 months!

Challenges of content marketing

Much like any other marketing and advertising methods, there are challenges to creating content. The biggest challenge (as identified by 36% of respondents in an anonymous survey) is creating engaging content. The second biggest challenge after that is consistently producing content that remains engaging.

Stats from Custom Content Council

Engaging content can feel like a mystery to most, and then adding in timing and other factors, sometimes content marketing can be off-putting which means it can be neglected by your business. Instead of just giving up, drop us an email to discuss how we can help you deliver measurable content marketing.

Through content marketing, a brand instantly opens up more channels and new ways of sharing stories with their customers. This more personal and ‘off-the-record’ style of communication allows the customer to see the face beyond the product. Content like this can be distributed on a blog post, an email newsletter, Youtube, or social networks. This quality content isn’t aimed at making the sale, but rather to entertain, inform and assist your customer.

How can your brand or client build trust through content?

• Consistent, quality content. Making sure that you publish regularly and at a reasonable standard means that your audience know what to expect and build trust in you. A good example is Innocent Drinks who have a ‘Bored‘ page on their website which offers anyone wanting to kill some time a look through their library, their Youtube page, where their charities lie, gallery and their blog.
• Be everywhere. Your customers are on a huge array of disparate social networks, mobile devices, and web sites. Having an integrated multi-channel approach is vital to start and develop conversations. This also increases your spreadability.
• Keeping a discussion going. Whether it is through blogs or email campaigns, people like their opinions heard–and you can start the conversation! Acknowledge multiple viewpoints as part of your content strategy.
• Going beyond selling. While press releases, updates about products, and daily deals are any company’s bread and butter, a brand should also seem more “human.” Talking with customers like a normal person, without trying to sell something all the time, will build trust quickly more than anything else.

Let’s take GE, for example. While most consider General Electric to be just one of a handful of big companies, they inherently trust the company, their brand and products. Not resting on these laurels, however, GE set up Ecomangination, which is an initiative to make good ideas happen from normal, everyday people. Now, GE is linked to “good ideas,” supplying a platform where people can share, interact and discuss how to make a difference in the world.

Another example is smaller businesses and companies using social media power like Facebook and Twitter to fuel content, giving the customer a sneak peek into their day-to-day work, for example. Snapping a photo and uploading it to an album on Facebook with a snazzy caption wins people’s trust as they are involved with a company that is now more transparent and inclusive.

Or a very common method is through viral videos and posts. John St., a digital marketing agency based in Toronto, used content marketing to release a viral video that not only created buzz but also built trust. The video, “Catvertising,” saw tons of press coverage and gave insight to who they are. Instead sending an email, cold calling, or other traditional means to build clientele, John St. created a story and a discussion with quality content.

There are endless ways in which a brand can use content to gain the trust of their customers, and since content is consistent, trust can keep building and remain consistent too.

Know What Information Consumers Are Searching For

Developing an effective content marketing campaign means consumer brands must be sharp in identifying and tracking the key search topics that consumers want. This kind of pre-emptive strike also means you anticipate why those topics are in demand. Clear identification of what audience segment you’re aiming for means only the relevant people will get relevant information at the right time and through the right channel. This gives the brand relevancy.

Offer Consumers Information That They Can Benefit From

The content brands lead their consumers to needs to be industry-related and beneficial. The best consumer brands that have carved out a name as known experts are the ones that provide help, advice and information beyond the parameters of brand product and service. They deliver crisp and interesting case studies, recent research, tests, polls, surveys and other industry-specific content that still drive it back to key values and vision of the brand, and through that, build authority through content.

Develop Niche-Specific Content

To become a known expert, consumer brands can’t be overly ambitious or ambiguous in the kind of content they push out. Instead, a simpler process of focusing and developing content within a particular niche is necessary, and boosts your search engine cred as you increasingly use keywords and key phrases that trace back to you as an ‘expert’.

Get Involved

Really, becoming a known expert in your field comes from ‘just doing it’. Starting to write great content that solves a customer need. By consistently doing this, you will see increased traffic from search engines and social recommendations, which will help you define what makes great content for your audience. Write, measure, learn.

The ‘beauty’ of content marketing

One of the most interesting trends in 2011 was the huge boom of beauty and fashion companies utilizing content marketing to speak on a more personal level with customers. Instead of telling consumers what they want, companies such as L’Oreal and JC Penney replaced the “want” with interests and likes. As Facebook made sharing popular with the masses, beauty and fashion companies allowed their customers to share their likes about the content and products, without forceful advertising.

For example, JC Penney has this website, which proclaims “dress like a man” to advertise and sell clothing for men. L’Oreal also uses content marketing to share make up advice with young women on this website, interjecting about their brand (and even other competing brands) throughout the tutorials and advice, without being intrusive.

Brands look for new levels of connection, integration

GE's Ecomagination - Screenshot.

Beauty and fashion companies haven’t been the only consumer brands looking into content–companies like GE, General Mills, and Guinness have started to join in on the movement as well.

General Mills shares recipes, GE has Ecomingation, and Guinness has a content-rich magazine “1759,” all of which help inspire consumers while also shedding light on the company and their vision. Each of these examples have become successful concepts for these brands, taking the ‘top-of-funnel’ marketing function away from brand advertising and towards measurable and trackable consumer content marketing.

All of these campaigns have something in common, too: the products are never front and center, or pushed in the consumer’s face. Instead, the content focuses on the reality and aspirations of the target market, with tangible ideas and concepts that can be used in everyday life, and inspiration for living better lives. It can spark differing viewpoints about an idea or motivate someone to do some “good” in the world and through that, sharing the content further.

Implementing B2C content marketing

What can you do to help your client or own business to have just as successful of a consumer content marketing strategy? At idio, our on-demand, integrated content marketing platform delivers a 4 step process:

• Strategy: Deciding–and discovering–what exactly should be published. What would be best for your business or your client’s business?
• Sourcing: Finding and curating enough sources and content to engage and interest the consumer, and having enough of it to keep everything relevant and fresh.
• Delivery: Since users surf the Internet in many different ways, idio will deliver content across many different channels, in a personalized way based on real-time customer data.
• Measurement: While publishing and keeping content marketing active is the start, measuring the outcome against defined business goals allows for a test-measure-and-iterate approach.

Remember the magazine Guinness used for their own campaign? The idio platform was used to create this, using those four stages to deliver a fantastic multi-channel content experience for the target male demographic.

Do drop us an email if you are interested in finding out more.