Source: Art+ Marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. It is basically providing relevant useful content of your expertise to potentially help a consumer solve their problem through engagement.
Now, why is content marketing so important to a business?
According to Forbes, there are 4 steps of the purchasing cycle that we need to understand and therefore create what is “valuable” to our consumers.
Awareness – consumers may have a need prior to awareness, but they are not aware of a solution. Research – after the consumer is aware of a solution, they will begin researching to educate themselves. Consideration – consumers at this stage start to compare different products or services to ensure they are getting a high-quality product at a fair price. Buy – the consumer makes their final decision and purchases a product.
It is crucial for a business to implement marketing strategies that target the first two steps of this purchasing cycle. As a result, content marketing is used to raise awareness of solutions and educate consumers of a product or service they may have never considered purchasing before.
Source: Coles Website – Recipe & Tips
Coles’s content marketing strategy showcases its fresh produce by providing consumers with online recipes, monthly recipe magazine’s and short cooking videos. Many people are caught up with work or studies and when it comes to cooking, for example, for dinner after a long day, it is difficult to come up with what to make. However, Coles provides various sub-categories that specifically lists different recipes, i.e. ‘Quick & Easy’ recipes. Taste.com.au has also partnered with Coles to present all recipes shown in Coles’s monthly magazine on their website. This further attracts consumers in terms of awareness and giving them solutions for their meal selections. It may also lead to improving sales as these recipes may prompt consumers to purchase ingredients from Coles to perform the cooking tasks.
Source: Taste.com.au – Coles Magazine Recipes
Have you tried looking up a recipe and going to the supermarket to get that one ingredient you are missing on the list? Or have you experienced content marketing with a brand before?
