3 Key Principles for Success in Content Marketing

Content marketing can mean almost anything to do with marketing. This has led to much confusion because content creation straddles many other disciplines. We clear this up in the following three principles for developing an effective content marketing strategy.

Defining what it means to your business is all important. For this reason, a marketing team should carefully consider the way to frame content marketing as it sets the scene for the other principles. This will depend on factors such as team size, industry, and budget.

A brand voice to determine the long-term success of a business’ content marketing strategy. However, as short-term success is often favoured, this rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Consider the example of an online business selling shoes. The business may decide that content marketing covers website, blog, and social media content. The business then has a choice whether to create content with little consideration of how it knits together, or alternatively, to do so with a clear brand voice in mind.

A brand voice can be developed by researching the market to identify the style and tone to use, as explained in our content consistency principles. This insight will then inform the development of a set of style guidelines.

Typically, individual contributors will naturally develop their own style, but this principle becomes increasingly important as the size of a content team increases. There are many examples of style guidelines online, which can quickly become a key differentiator for a brand.

Storytelling is an art that is especially effective within content marketing. However, it also needs to be defined and explained to avoid it losing meaning. Storytelling does not mean simply writing an article with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is debated, but in our view, this is simply just copywriting 101. Instead, we refer to storytelling as moving beyond having a defined writing style, into an arena that is altogether more inspiring.

It is the art of being able to bring a product or business to life by syncing it within a broader societal context. For this reason, it is usually most evident during content campaigns, and particularly those that stretch into other marketing disciplines. This can be seen clearly in our in-depth research of leading brands in the content marketing industry.

Furthermore, you can read about this in our Nike brand analysis, which shows how the brand’s early adverts included detailed copy about how Nike’s shoes were aligned with the needs of runners. This is a useful example as storytelling is more often applicable to marketing copy as opposed to SEO content. By marketing copy, we mean copy that is used to attract interest in products or services. This differs from SEO content, which is typically designed to educate readers on a particular topic.

Without storytelling, marketing copy can be dry and unemotive, however well written it is. With storytelling, it can be engaging and captivating, and make people feel great about themselves. The ability to generate this difference isn’t easy, as it takes bravery to go above and beyond, as well as the preparedness to make mistakes. Brands that adopt this are notorious for having both attributes. Furthermore, they are the brand that most marketers would like to emulate.

Mastering the discipline

These three principles are fundamental to the long-term success of content marketing within any business. If you have been reading the series, you may also realise that we haven’t crossed-over, which makes the principles applicable to those channels too.

We hope you enjoyed reading. You may like to discover more principles for marketing success. Alternatively, if you have any further questions, please do get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.