Everyone hates intrusive adverts but we go ahead and create them anyway. There’s a new product every day pushed into social feeds and emails. Isn’t it obvious that advertisement is just the impulsive approach to marketing? We all turn to adverts when we need to sell.

Adverts come at odd hours or even times when you just want a clear head. On the other hand, there are similar pages that allow you to sit back and enjoy a quick laugh or some new mushy story about baby whales.

What are your most visited pages this week? Or let’s say this month? What’s that page marketing to you? It’s important to understand the ever-dynamic nature of advertising. Selling without selling seems quite ironic but it’s catching on quite fast among major corporate giants.

Pages, where you spend a lot of time reading, having fun or building new networks, have become a major part of your decision-making process and can quite easily influence your purchases.

Results Require Smart Marketing

The chances of buying from a brand that makes you laugh skyrockets for every extra time you spend engaging their content. If a brand has helped you by filling in some blanks or knowledge gaps, loyalty seems like an appropriate way to pay back.

It’s not out of place to say most people are emotional buyers. Emotions sell products and services. What better way to evoke emotions than through stories and content?

A client’s social page went from random Ads to providing Networking and Growth information to marketers. This strategy has helped to improve engagement significantly, and attract a wider network and even speaking invites. These are growing opportunities for the brand that would not have come from direct, in your face, advertising.

Instead of selling directly to the market, content marketing has helped this client build a less intrusive approach to marketing their brand.

Most People Hate Adverts

Content Marketing Institute says that 70% of people would rather learn about a company via an article than an ad. Even The New York Times admits that native advertisements can perform as well as the paper’s own news content.

Alexander Jutkowitz (Hill+Knowlton Strategies), mentions that the phenomenon of content marketing and brand publishing has unfolded rapidly because it responds to consumer preference. Brand publishing allows companies to react in real-time, provide increased transparency, and create a strong brand identity at a fraction of the price of traditional marketing tactics, and in less time.

Content marketing introduces the self-publishing wave of the 21st century into the marketing funnel. In the bid to build long-lasting strategies for grooming loyal audiences, brands are turning to publishers, in order to create valuable content.

The possibilities that come with leveraging and owning your own ideas are endless. This ability to position owned brands as an authority on particular industry needs has become a gold mine.

Build a Legacy Through Valuable Content

When this strategy is adequately implemented, it allows businesses to look inwards and see in clearer details the true value of information stored and transformed within their business processes. A company can easily emerge with its own Magazine, Bulletin and even publishing arm that disseminates the outcomes of their business development and growth.

Big brands are poaching top-talent journalists in droves and implementing the most successful aspects of the traditional media house, says Alexander Jutkowitz. Former journalist Hamish McKenzie is now a lead writer at Tesla, USA Today’s Michelle Kessler is now Editor-in-Chief at Qualcomm Spark, and Andreessen Horowitz lured Michael Copeland from Wired.

These businesses and corporate companies have seen the crucial role that writers play in capturing the brand’s audiences using editorial best practices. Brands want to synthesize information and big data with stories that are relevant to their end-users.

Marketing is no longer just about selling products and getting new leads. It has become a big part of producing, unearthing, and distributing information. This makes the corporation become not just economically important to society, but intellectually essential as well.

According to Alexander Jutkowitz, General Electric, and Red Bull are great examples of the legacy role content marketing and publishing plays for corporate entities.

These companies include with their marketing:

1. Information and research.
2. Publication.
3. Media agency.
4. Content Production.

These inclusions are quite different from the products or services they sell. They, however, deploy content marketing as a tool for capturing the imagination and attention of their audience.

Despite the fact that sponsored content might have the weakness of bias towards the brand, it allows readers the freedom to explore. It gives some sense of integrity and accountability. Emotions of trust and satisfaction would easily evoke a buying culture that is more than just circumstantial. Informed buyers are not necessarily disloyal buyers. In fact, giving the right information to buyers comes as an incentive for being ahead of the competition in providing customer satisfaction even before a sale has been made. It is less intrusive and speaks directly to the customer’s needs.

If you’d like to learn more about digital content marketing for your business, startup or a small venture, join my webinar this month. Click here.

Maybe you are still struggling with writing great articles or adverts, you can get some of my books and start learning about your writing abilities.

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