Email marketing: what it is and how to implement it

What is content marketing? (Definition, Effects, Success Stories)

 With the development of search engine algorithms, search engines now understand texts like humans, understand user intent, and expose appropriate content to the top. In this situation, search engine optimization (SEO) must ultimately provide quality content. Learn about the definition, effectiveness, and content marketing success stories.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy for a brand to attract and retain the audience it targets by consistently creating and distributing content that is valuable, useful, and consistent for its customers. Ultimately, it aims to drive profitable customer behavior and build strong relationships with customers.

According to the 2021 State of Marketing Hubspot Report, 82% of marketers are actively using content marketing. So, why is content marketing so important?

With the spread of the Internet and the launch of smartphones, people actively search and find information on portal sites and social media when they have questions. Afterward, we make a decision by synthesizing the content we consume.

 Content marketing that provides useful information to target customers is essential in order to quickly discover brands and build relationships with moving customers. When customers share and consume content that they judge to be useful, customers feel great value and brand awareness can also increase.

The effectiveness of content marketing

1. Increase brand awareness and credibility

: Brand awareness increases as customers consume and voluntarily share content they find useful, and when consistent topics are continuously provided, brand credibility also increases.

2. High conversion rate for low cost

: According to a Demand Metric study, content marketing costs about 62% less than other marketing and generates three times as many leads. You can reach customers who are more likely to buy your product at a lower cost than typical advertising costs.

3. Communicating information about products and services

: As potential customers come to your site, you can introduce your brand to people who were unaware of your products and services, and communicate the values ​​your company seeks and what problems it can solve.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

: If you continue to provide high-quality content on a consistent topic, you will receive a good evaluation from the portal site and the chance of exposing your brand for free will increase.

5. Accumulation of brand assets

: Consistently published content accumulates as brand assets, unlike temporary advertisements. In addition, you can accumulate meaningful data assets in addition to general member data, such as which interests customers highly respond to with published content.

6. Build relationships with customers

: We can develop better products and services by understanding customer needs through content marketing. This allows consumers to believe that the company is listening to their customers and creates loyalty to the brand, which in turn creates a strong relationship between the company and its customers.

Two Content Marketing Success Stories

1. AMEX – Open Forum

What is content marketing? (Definition, Effects, Success Stories)

One of the effects of content marketing can be seen as an increase in brand credibility and authority. As a representative example, American Express's Open Forum is introduced as a successful case of overseas content marketing.

In 2007, AMEX began targeting small businesses to focus on what truly helps customers. We provided knowledge, experience, and information to help you successfully run a business, a topic your target is interested in rather than talking about cards or company products. Without expecting an immediate ROI, the number of visitors naturally increased through steady content publication, and in 2010, it acquired 1 million monthly visitors and over 11,000 new small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) subscribers.

The Open Forum also provided content written by experts outside AMEX, not inside. Articles written by authoritative external experts increase the credibility of readers and search engines also consider the page to be credible.

  A News Cred and Redshift Research financial content survey found that only 20% of respondents would trust financial content written by bank representatives, and 53% of respondents would trust financial content written by objective journalists with financial expertise. As these findings show, AMEX has increased the transparency of content by allowing external experts to provide content, making the Open Forum more trustworthy to customers.

AMEX's open forum is currently operating under the name of Business Class. Under the slogan of “Insights and inspiration to help grow your business” that shows a consistent purpose even today, AMEX consistently provides high-quality content covering the entire business, including finance, marketing, HR, and strategy, showing the essence of content marketing.

2. Zigzag – “You can buy whatever you want” by. Yoon Yeo-Jeong

What is content marketing? (Definition, Effects, Success Stories)

ZigZag, a shopping app that 1030 uses a lot, made a big impact by hiring actress Yoon Yeo-Jeong in her 70s as a model. In April 2021, a 13-second video of Zig Zag featuring actress Yoon Yeo-Jeong will surpass 1 million views in just two days. The fact that the message to be delivered to the customer was clear and that the brand awareness and image increased by continuously trying to communicate with customers rather than ending with temporary advertisements can be seen as a successful case of content marketing.

First of all, the message that ZigZag wants to convey to customers is, “The main character in life is oneself, so do not worry about others and do what you want.” The copy of “You can buy whatever you want” comes from this clear purpose.

 In particular, this message is suitable for the characteristics of the MZ generation, a target customer that values ​​consumption. Actress Yoon Yeo-Jeong, who has always challenged herself, delivered the message of life that one must try to find out what she likes and what suits her well, thereby ensuring the authenticity of the message.

In addition, Zigzag tried to approach communication with customers with the tone of actress Yoon Yeo-Jeong. Leave an app update notice saying, “Even if you fix the testimonials, you keep getting bugs.” Or, on the official YouTube channel, ZigZag’s ad parody video, “Aww, these guys parody my video, aren’t they very over there?”

 We continued to communicate with customers through consistent content, not just temporary advertisements. These phrases were voluntarily shared by customers on social media and online communities, which naturally raised the brand's awareness.

According to Open Survey’s MZ Generation Fashion App Trend Report 2021, the proportion of respondents who answered that the image of the app through the zigzag advertising model “has changed very positively” was a total of 41%, which was significantly higher than other services that were in the late 10% to early 20% range. Also, after seeing the ad, the response to “very willing to buy” was 33%, the highest among fashion apps.

The current app update notice was changed to a general phrase again, but during the campaign, it was content marketing that could clearly imprint the brand value pursued by ZigZag to customers.

Conclusion

Wherever you start content marketing, your destination should be a website or app where brands have 100% control over their direct message and customer experience (Owned Media). This is because we need to create an environment where brands can directly deliver the message they want to deliver to consumers, away from dependence on large external platforms. I end this article with the hope that many successful content marketing cases can be found in Korea as well.