Author: Armando Roggio / Source: Practical eCommerce
There is a subtle art to content marketing, to balance the need to sell products while offering audience-centric, helpful information.
The value of that content must take precedence over short-term product sales for it to attract, engage, and retain potential customers.
Content marketing purists might even argue that new businesses should start as publishers and broadcasters, building an audience before they try to sell products.
Thus, there’s the aforementioned balance between trying to create content that people want to read or watch with the need to leverage that content relationship to sell products.
How does a business integrate the products it sells with the content it publishes without cheapening articles or videos meant to engage?
1. Focus on How Products Are Made or Used
Content — be it an article, a social media post, or a video — can be useful, informative, or entertaining and still be about your business or your products.
The difference is in how that content describes your products. If your business comes across as self-interested, your content marketing will fail. But if you can convey passion or value in a way that captivates, you should be successful.
One of the content marketing examples I cite most often is the “short film” actor Matthew McConaughey made for Wild Turkey about a year ago.
The video is entertaining in the same way that good documentary stories are entertaining. When you watch you learn something about the brand. You may even want to buy Wild Turkey. But you are not being sold. You are being told an interesting story in an entertaining way.
What makes this video interesting to me is how well it is executed, especially when you compare it to similar videos.
For example, in 2014, Wild Turkey released a 15-minute film about master distiller Jimmy Russell, who is also mentioned in the McConaughey video.
Some of the footage and dialog from the previous video, “Jimmy: The Man Behind the…
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