By Eoin Harmon – bbmm.ie
Without being fully aware, I have been engaging with content marketing for several years now. The YouTube phenomenon Will it Blend? seemed like a simple but ingenious way to harness the power of humour on social media. Obviously, it’s much more than that.
By demonstrating the destructive power of its blenders, Blendtec and its founder Tom Dickson made the company’s products highly desirable for people for relatively little cost and effort. By ignoring more traditional marketing techniques, Blendtec bypassed its more illustrious competitors and surged directly to the attention of prospective customers.
The consistent themes of the series is easy to digest for viewers (i.e. the “don’t breathe this!” catchphrase), while a total disregard for mainstream products like the Apple iPad only further boosts intrigue. The infamous mass request for a crowbar to be blended was comically teased in one episode, but never properly attempted. This was received as a cop-out as fans wanted to see something survive the mighty blender. You can’t win them all!
The Blendtec YouTube channel is still going strong, but it’s on a dip compared to its peak run four or five years ago. However, content marketing itself is not to be ignored if you are determined to forge your business’ online identity.
When browsing online, many people are fed up of being told this and that…good and bad and so forth on adverts. Instead, they want to make an informed decision for themselves. Content marketing does not rely on selling products, but instead it provides knowledge and demonstrations of your brand to better inform consumers.
If a person who is unfamiliar with the area in which you work, a simple but effective form of content marketing is to take on board any questions they have and replying to them. This approach could encourage him or her to return to you at their own choosing – possibly gaining a new customer that might ignore ‘one size fits all’ marketing.
For the most part, content marketing is either free or very cheap to get into. If you have built a base of followers on social media already, your business already has a foundation of people to content market to. If you’re short of ideas, you can mould a trendy idea or meme to suit your business and amuse or engage your customers.
There is no definitive guide to succeed with content marketing, but the more natural and honest you appear to people, the easier it is to boost your business’ profile with content marketing techniques.
