Content marketing isn’t just a marketing fad. It’s become very clear that content marketing is here to stay, and will very much be a part of brand marketing in the future.
Marketing teams at major brands are in the process of transitioning from traditional advertising strategies to digital. They’re having to figure out how to build and maintain a loyal customer base in the digital age. We no longer live in a world where brands can spend months developing the perfectly worded and designed advertising campaign. Now, it’s about being nimble and creating engaging, shareable content and pushing it out on social media sites quickly.
If you’re interested in learning more about major brands’ digital strategies, we recommend checking out the Digiday Brand Summit. The Summit is coming up in April in Nashville, and will feature real-life examples of how brands are adapting to the digital age. There will be information about content creation, social community building, and brand loyalty. Look out for case studies from brands like General Mills, GE, AMEX, Urban Outfitters, and Overstock.com.
Here are some ways that major brands are looking at content marketing. They will be talking about these strategies in depth at the conference, but the basic information is interesting, as it paints a picture of how big brands are adapting to the demands of modern consumers via creative “out of the box” thinking.
• General Mills conducted immersive consumer research to “find” Hamburger Helper’s voice on Twitter. They now have 10,000+ followers.
• Hasbro hosted an online contest for Monopoly fans which resulted in a new resurgence in popularity for the classic game, and lots of online buzz about the brand.
• GE utilized Vine, one of the newer and more challenging social sites to break into, to create popular 6SecondScience Fair videos.
• AMEX created a hashtag campaign – #AmexArchive – to bring historical AMEX content to modern social channels. The campaign showed the evolution of AMEX and engaged more than 30 million people.
What all of these strategies tell us is that even legacy brands are compeltely revolutionizing their marketing and advertising strategies (see our Keds article from yesterday for further evidence). The most important common thread of all of the above campaigns is content. Each of these campaigns demanded lots of content in a short amount of time. That means that there is no room for weeks of messaging refinement and lots of rounds of revisions to graphics.
Based on brands’ experiences on social over the last few years, its become clear that the future of digital marketing is content, and that content will be produced, pushed out, shared, and made irrelevant more quickly than we ever could have imagined 20 years ago.
For more info on the Digiday Brand Summit, check out the conference website here: http://digiday.com/announcement/top-brands-approaching-content-dbs/