By Victor Cho, CEO, Evite
From Evite’s Ice Cream Sundae Bar guide, sponsored by Reddi-wip
The smart marketer knows that the best way to drive engagement and loyalty — and ultimately, profits — is to integrate your brand into content customers would want to consume anyway.
Help users solve problems, deliver real value and make them smile, and they’ll reward you with positive word of mouth and remember you when they’re ready to buy. Enter content marketing: an opportunity to reach users with your brand messaging seamlessly integrated into content they actually seek out.
And companies are catching on. Fifty-nine percent plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2015, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
Only a year old, our content marketing program has already helped deliver millions of dollars in incremental sales. Our network of blogger experts distributes our sponsored content, offering tremendous (and scalable) reach. For example, a Coke content marketing campaign that ran for two weeks in January racked up 12 million page views from blogger content distribution on top of the 200,000 from Evite alone.
Over the past 12 months, we’ve learned what really works for our users and our advertisers. Our top three content marketing musts:
- Make it visually beautiful and thus highly shareable on social channels and by bloggers
- Custom-tailor the content to what works for our audience and serves the client’s brand and target
- Keep the brand messaging subtle and organic
Want to reach an audience that wants to hear from you to build engagement, brand loyalty and sales? Done well, content marketing does it all.
Victor Cho can be reached at victor.cho@evite.com.