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Content marketing may seem like this year’s buzzword, but it’s been around as long as digital marketing has existed– it just lacked a fancy name before. In short, the art of content marketing is showing your audience that you’re the best at what you do. We’d insert a quote of our own if we had one better than this…
“Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing the world you are one”
– Robert Rose
Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that you’re the owner of a restaurant that makes the best fried chicken in all of Miami. Let’s assume you already have a good website with a blog. In this instance, we might want to create content such as:
- An interview with the head chef
- A history of the restaurant
- Your love of soul food
- Other items on your menu that people should try
- What customers are saying about your fried chicken
- The secret ingredient in your fried chicken
- Best beers to pair with your fried chicken
- Where you get your chicken from
- How you prepare the chicken
- Why you don’t serve chicken and waffles
- Your favorite places to get friend chicken outside of Miami
- Photos of a fried chicken eating contest you held
- An event recap of your booth at a Fried Chicken Expo
Now let’s imagine you run a music venue and that there’s a band called The Duck People playing in a few weeks. Hypothetically, we could create over 100 different pieces of content for this show, but here are some of the most popular formats:
Pre-show content
- 6 reasons to see The Duck People
- A stream of the most popular songs by The Duck People
- Why The Duck People think Miami is the best city (Interview)
- The 4 craziest moments of a Duck People performance
- Everything You Need To Know About The Duck People
- A contest to win tickets to see The Duck People on [insert date here]
- 5 questions answered by The Duck People
- A post on why The Duck People’s latest song is the song of the year
- Playing paintball with The Duck People
Post-show content
- Photos of the show
- A written recap of the show
- Fan reaction to the show
- Social media reaction to the show
- Video of the show
- Featured media blog posts of the show
- Post-show interview with the band
Even if they don’t end up seeing to see The Duck People, readers should be hooked onto your venue even more than before by finding your content useful and entertaining.
Ultimately, we want to uncover what your ideal audience wants to know more about, and we’ll essentially answer those questions with expert-driven blog posts. You’re obviously the expert at what you do, so the majority of information we use in blog posts will actually be coming from you. In the case of The Duck People show, developing content via outreach to the band and fans would be vital. Our job is to put everything in a format that is easy on the eyes and that supports the meat of the content with surrounding words. We will help you reach your end goals by building trust with your audience, driving people to your website, bringing awareness to your brand, generating leads, expanding your presence on social media, and by getting people to buy what you’re selling.
In addition to actually creating the content, we’ll need to distribute it too….everywhere. We’ll also start building your email list and social media followers. Why? So you can reach them when you have a key message to share. Think about it… anyone willing to give you their email address or follow you on Pinterest is interested in what you’re doing and actually WANTS to hear from you. I will explain more about distribution, building lead lists, and ultimately driving business in future blog posts.
So, why is New Content Collective different than, let’s say, the agency down the street or the local “social media ninja” (for the record, I hate the word ninja as it pertains to marketing)?
We write content for your customers, not robots
We will never create content with the primary goal of ranking high in search engines. Ever.
Woah, what?!?!
Look, everyone wants to show up on the first page of Google, but, ironically, the best way to get there is not to try to write blogs for the search engines. Every day, Google and Bing are getting better at analyzing the internet. Every day, they’re better able to filter quality from junk. Every day, they’re trying to reward content that’s actually useful and makes the internet a better place. They’ve come a long way from the days when getting a lot of backlinks would rank your website near the top.
So if you want Google to love your content and website, simply have great content (and that’s where we come in, hey boo).
We don’t charge agency fees
“Agency fee” is not a phrase you’ll hear from us. It’s not that we’re devaluing our work (we need to make money too); we just don’t have a lot of the same expenses that agencies have such as: a big office, billboards, TV commercials, tons of overhead. Plus, we know that running a small business is already expensive as it is (remember, we’re running a small business too). The marketing budget you put aside NEEDS to pay off. An agency fee is a premium that doesn’t make sense for small, local businesses with limited budgets.
We want to work with businesses of ALL sizes. More than likely, a smaller budget won’t get you the maximum results, but we’ll let you know all of your options from the get-go, and we won’t try to oversell you. We TRULY believe that every business deserves great content. If you think you don’t have a big enough budget, challenge us to convince you otherwise.
Worth noting, everyone who works for New Content Collective is essentially a freelancer. No salaries (for now). We work remotely (for now); when/if we get an office space, there’s a good chance it’ll be a co-working space or just a glorified conference room. We also do not have plans of dabbling with expensive traditional media. Almost all of our own marketing budget goes towards the things we preach: online content creation, SEO, social media, PPC, and email marketing.
We shine our own shoes
A lot of marketing companies tell their clients to do this and that….but they don’t actually do those things themselves. Like the saying goes, “the shoe shiner always has the dirtiest shoes” (or something like that).
If we tell you that your business needs a blog (which is usually the first thing we’ll say), well, go to our site and see our blog. Please note: If you’re seeing this on 11/13/14, you might want to check back in a few days; this is our first post, cut us some slack (jeez!). If we tell you that your business needs to build an email list, you best be sure we’re building our email list behind-the-scenes (you probably got our pop-up already, sign up!). If we tell you your website isn’t user-friendly, just look at our website structure- it’s organized to easily find what you want.
We don’t bite more than we can chew
There might be a time when we need to defer new clients until we’re able to find more freelancers to put the necessary focus into your business. We don’t want any of our customers to be neglected because we’re spreading ourselves too thin. This problem is found far too often in bigger agencies. Certain higher paying clients overshadow the lower budget clients, and if you’re low on their totem pole, well, tough luck. New Content Collective promises to give your business 100% of the attention it needs.
We focus on what really matters
BREAKING NEWS: Facebook Likes don’t really mean that much these days
THIS JUST IN: Ranking #1 on Google doesn’t mean you’re going to get lots of new business
READ ALL ABOUT IT: The doge meme you just shared on Instagram got hearted 11 times. Much wow
DUH NA NA NA, DUH NA NA NA (The ESPN sound): Your contest to win an iPad got 2,000 email entries…. all of which are middle schoolers who will never purchase your premium mountain bikes. Cool story, bro.
Facebook Likes, search engine positions, less qualified email leads, social media engagement… these all hold some value, but they only work efficiently together.
Here’s an example of how we look at Facebook Likes…
Let’s pretend that you own Hialeah Bike Company. Together, we created a great piece of content on your website’s blog about your favorite mountain bike trails in South Florida. We target that content to all your Facebook fans who are:
- from South Florida
- interested in biking
- possibly already customers
They eat up the content by sharing it on social media (now their friends are seeing it), liking it, or commenting on your website. A few of them sign up for your email list to get more posts like this one. Some of them contact you for more info. Most of them have been cookie-d so we can target them later. One or two (or hopefully more) buy a bike from you because you CLEARLY know a lot about mountain biking. One or two (or hopefully more) buy a bike from you in the next month because they originally got interested in your brand from the previous month’s blog post that they saw on Facebook, then saw again on email, and then saw again on a re-targeting ad.
Now we want to run a contest on your blog and/or Facebook with the goal to get people excited about your business and also help build your email list. Rather than giving away an iPad, which will just attract a lot of Apple fans that don’t necessarily like biking, we opt to give away a bicycle that you sell. The rules for the contest are simple: give your name and email for a chance to win this awesome bike. A winner will be chosen at random in a month…..
One month passes
You now are the proud owner of an email list of 1500 South Florida bike enthusiasts that you can reach with key messages going forward. Down the road, it is likely that some of the email subscribers will buy a bike.
Those 2 examples lead to REAL business goals. It’s all part of a funnel that hopefully drips into a sale.
We’re a small business, just like you
We understand your concerns and daily obstacles because we’re a small business just like you. We’re trying to grow our business the same way you are. We don’t have infinite budgets, we have up-and-down months, and we know what it feels like to be sold the wrong product.
Our focus is to drive your business goals by letting your audience know that you’re the expert in your city. This can be done through quality, relevant content that we can create and distribute to your target audience. We won’t oversell you. We won’t overcharge you. We will quote you an amount that is suitable to achieve your goals and makes sense for you. We will make it happen.
Still unsure? Reach out to us for a free quote by calling (305) 767 -2658 or emailing us at info@newcontentcollective.com.