The Applications Of Content Marketing Marketing Essay

The Applications Of Content Marketing Marketing Essay Several companies use content marketing channels to have consumers like the content, comment on the content, and share the content. With its fairly new existence, companies are just now starting to take advantage of its application. However, many companies have been extremely successful with its use. With the expansion of social media, companies have had great success on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to market their products content. A few companies that have had success with content marketing include Instagram, American Express, and Mint. The expansion of social media marketing is helping expand content marketing as well. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all provide a simple and affordable method of marketing content. Facebook, probably the most used channel, allows businesses to post information via wall posts, pictures, or videos on a businesss page for the world to see. This allows users to get the information about products and from there, they can share it with other users on Facebooks website. Next is Twitter. Twitter allows businesses to post a tweet about their products that will appear on their followers timeline. From there, their followers can retweet the message and allow other users to view it who follow them. Many businesses use Twitter to keep their customers informed about the products they offer and products they will soon offer. Instagram is a photo-sharing program and social media website that allows users to take a picture and share it with virtually the world. The service is free allowing many consumers as well as businesses to take advantage of its service. Businesses are now using Instagram for content marketing purposes. A successful lesson that can be learned from Instagram is that it has no direct target market. Anyone who takes a picture and uploads it is a great target for the company. This allows Instagram to have a diverse consumer base for different purposes. Next, this gives businesses an advantage because it allows consumers to see what businesses post about the content of their products. For content marketing purposes, Instagrams blog serves as a platform for users to tell their stories via images. Rather than directly promoting itself, Instagram gives users the power to share themselves via the Instagram product (Cohen, 2012). Next, American Express has expanded its content marketing strategies with the creation of OpenForum.com (Snow, 2011). Open Forum is a content marketing websites that allows a variety of businesses to post information, such as blogs, videos, articles, or podcasts, on their website to attract other businesses to it in order to increase business-to-business sales. Open Forum gives small businesses the tools they need to operate and information about how to operate their business. Some content is created by other publishers like Inc. Magazine or Mashable, and posted on Open Forums website, and other articles are created by Open Forum writers. According to Shane Snow, a writer for Mashable, Open Forum is a hybrid advertising/guest blogging/in-house editorial operation, and its fostering a community around the topic of running a business. Also according to Snow, some lessons from American Expresses content marketing is get trusted contributors to publish guest content on your properties, d evelop users around a topic and let your brand be the host of the community, and do not neglect original content that was created. Mint is considered a market leader in online personal finance. It has been very successful with its content marketing strategies. Mints blog created a blog entitled MintLife that was a core part of the companys operation. Mint dedicated significant resources to its blog, including a full time editorial staff and a slew of freelance contributors, unlike other companies that might rarely update their blogs or social media webpages. It used social news sites like Reddit and Digg, and Mint began to build their consumer base when their consumers began to see reliable and interesting content on the sites. The readers of the site began to become customers of Mint and started to promote Mints products on personal social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter. Kraft Foods has also been very successful in content marketing. Their focus is not on marketing their products; however, it is on bettering their current customers and subscribers lives and maintaining good customer relationship management. An example of their content marketing strategy is kraftrecipes.com that has been online since 1992. Kraftrecipes.com offers recipes to its subscribers. They also have expanded to using YouTube as well as mobile apps and social media sites. In order to measure their content marketing success, Kraft measures its traffic and engagement on different channels and sites (Gutman, Kraft Foods Dishes Out Its Recipe for Successful Content Marketing, 2012). According to Julie Fleischer, Director of Content Strategy Integration at Kraft Foods, The ROI on our Content Marketing work is among the highest of all of our marketing efforts. The last company of focus is Sears Holdings Company. Sears uses various ways of connecting people with their content. FitStudio is Searss online fitness community. On the site, they use different fitness experts to create content (Gutman, Sears Explains Its Success In Content Marketing, 2012). The expert contributors all reach various wellness communities and draw them to the FitStudio content, according to Julia Fitzgerald, Chief Digital Officer for Fitness, Sporting Goods Toys at Sears. They use several different channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, and Shop Your Way, to promote the FitStudio content as well as some paid methods of distribution as well. To measure their success, the look at FitStudios membership, engagement, page views, return visits, coupon redemption, or purchase (Gutman, Sears Explains Its Success In Content Marketing, 2012). Overall, they look at how engaged are their customers in determining their success.