Content is one of the most important tools in your brand toolkit – whether it’s to create awareness or brand identity, or to directly drive revenue, become more cost-efficient and personalize the customer experience. Which is to say, a brand can use content marketing to do far more than marketing.
According to Forbes, content marketing is more than just a one-way interaction, throwing information into the faces of your potential customers, clients and community. At its heart, content marketing seeks to create a conversation with your consumers. This type of conversation is vital to any brand’s marketing technique as traditional above-the-line marketing techniques are expected to be bolstered by a community and a direct line of communication through socials.
At Department of the Future we’ve always championed the power of video content – especially short form digital video. After years of watching our videos work hard for our clients, engaging and creating conversations with their audience, we finally have the statistics to back our experiences up. Turns out, people really, really like watching videos. In fact, video is the best performing content format– in terms of engagement across every industry and every geography. In particular, short-form video, which is less than two minutes, was the ultimate top performer.
With over 78% of consumers saying that personally relevant content increases their purchase intent, an integral part of our work at DOTF is understanding how audiences think. An essential part of our content strategy processes, involves identifying both the correct audience and the optimal channel for your comms.
Plus promises of transparency are very important as well, with 73% of consumers saying they’ll pay for a product if transparency is clear. Content marketing provides opportunities to engage your audience with authenticity and transparency. Showing products on video, presenting testimonials from genuine customers, maintaining a social media presence and flow of content that reacts to current conversations are all ways in which content marketing can help a brand to create an environment of transparency and trust.
You might also be surprised to learn that companies are using more financially-focused metrics such as efficiency (23%) and conversions (23%) to measure the success of their content strategies. At DOTF, we believe in content marketing because it has a greater ability for conversions than traditional marketing methods – because a piece of content can be tailored to specific audiences across the channels and spaces they know and love. Whilst you’ll see a lot of strategists showing views and engagements, we believe that it’s better to start a conversation and build a connection than it is to have 2 million people scroll past your ads – and that’s what content marketing is all about.