Author: Edgar Costa

Individuals are so connected to all social media platforms that they gravitate towards all interesting, viral and newsworthy information. With this exposure comes an increased need for businesses to have good Content marketing. So this blog will give you and your company guidelines on how to implement a successful content marketing strategy.

For a closer look and an accurate definition. Content marketing is an approach focused on creating and delivering valuable information or content to gain or retain the interest of an audience (Content Marketing Institute 2018).

This is how it’s done:

Focus and purpose – It’s not a surprise that every company wants to become successful and known worldwide. The challenge of understanding what we should be communicating and how we should be communicating remains our biggest hurdle to success. (Barry, J. 2015, pp.14-15). When implementing a blog strategy into the business it is important to know that this will represent the brand image so each blog should have a purpose, this should be to let the audience know more about the business and industry. The content should trigger the Information-gap. We’re most curious when we know a little about. This supports the information gap theory of curiosity, developed by George Loewenstein in the early 90s Lehrer, J., Simon, M. and Valdez, A. (2018)

Captivating title and relevant images- For the content to be appealing there has to be some visual stimuli for the audience to remain interested in reading the whole blog, this will also help them visualise the information that you are trying to get across. Strategic images that help your readers, while enhancing the content are necessary. Such as the Huffington post on Five Tech Wonders

Unique content – A unique angle or approach would make the content refreshing for the reader as they won’t be getting repetitive content unique content will give the readers a reason to come back. A good example of this is Huffington post on Tech Advent Calendar

Solid Structure – The blog should flow, everything should merge coherently with the inclusion of an introduction, a point, explanation and conclusion. The structure of the content is often overlooked however, it is important to keep in mind the audience. For a company to post blogs the requirements are strict since the content represents the brand, also the judgements of those companies in the same industry are important. An example of a blog with a clear structure is.

A measurement – It is important to set out a plan for how consistent the content output will be, Inconsistent posts are not successful having a time frame is important which also gives the readers a sense of reliability, for example a weekly Friday blog will let the audience know when to expect the content. KPI’s and metrics should be used to analyse the performance of each blog and track its growth, this is essential to take note of in order to improve.

Call to action – Possibly the most important. After reading the blog the reader is ready to respond and engage. What is the main purpose of attracting the audience what do you want them to do? Get their email address, visit your company website, purchase a product, or register to attend an event? Patel, N. (2019)

For more advice on how to write a successful blog click here

Overcoming the risks?

Although content marketing provides many benefits to companies especially those in the technology sector there are many reasons people avoid them.

• Poor content: Poorly written content can reflect badly on your brand (Klusster. 2018).
• Time consuming: could be focusing on tasks that will be more beneficial.
• Risk of no one seeing the content: it is a risk that blogs won’t have a big following or are even read.
• Strong writing skills and creativity.
• Duplicate content: other companies/ individuals maybe talking about the same content sharing very similar information, especially if it is a popular topic. So keep content the unique with different approaches to keep it refreshing for the reader and avoid using popular general information easily access from other sources.

Effective blogs will gain influence as it attracts repeated followers. Generate great feedback which can help enhance the business. It is able to inspire others and attract new customers and create partnerships with similar companies. If the goal is to create more brand recognition Blogging can help you increase search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
The significance of blogs in the technological and datacentre industry is highly underrated. It is a very important content marketing tool. Non-traditional information sources such as blogs help circulate information and influence consumers’ judgements by capturing their attention. (Hsu, C. & Lin, J.C. 2008).

To summarise content marketing is important and specifically blogging can generate many benefits to an individual or company, however the risks involved should be taken into account to make sure it becomes a strength rather than a drawback. A successful blog has numerous advantages and the initiative can be implemented fairly easily, so why not try?

References

Barry, J. 2015, Social content marketing for entrepreneurs, First edn, Business Expert Press, New York, New York, pp.14-15

Content Marketing Institute, 2018. What is Content Marketing? Available at: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/

Hsu, C. & Lin, J.C. 2008, “Acceptance of blog usage: The roles of technology acceptance, social influence and knowledge sharing motivation”, Information & Management, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 65-74.

Klusster. 2018. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Blogging. [online] Available at: https://www.klusster.com/portfolios/conscious-media-publishing/contents/2254.

Patel, N. 2019. Must-Have Ingredients of a Successful Blog Post. [online] Entrepreneur. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233891.

Lehrer, J., Simon, M. and Valdez, A. (2018). The Itch of Curiosity. [online] WIRED. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/the-itch-of-curiosity/.

Data centre world – The dark theme of the website creates an engaging experience however, it does take away from the users navigation experience, because it is moderately difficult to find specific information on the event. The tab names are not related to finding information about the events, making navigation harder. This creates a sense of frustration as the user is not able to find a specific section i.e previous event photos. Registration and exhibiting are clear in the centre of the page. Data centre world focuses more on the quantity of individuals attending the events.

Data cloud – Data cloud aims their website at end users and innovators. Attracting investors, financiers, business leaders and their customers. Currently they have one annual event on their homepage, they promote this event early to generate awareness early which gives them a chance to gain more registrations. The homepage background/video of where the event will be is very eye catching and is sure to keep people engaged as mentioned in (Blog 1). Data cloud noticeably has the best homepage however, since the menus are small it’s not immediately clear from this point where the user should navigate too next. The navigation bars have very clear and specific titles which shouldn’t create any confusion once the user knows what they want to find. Also the registration button on the right corner is noticeable despite its small appearance. for a 30 year old non gender specific with a job at one of the medium to large sized companies, usually a director, manager, CEO or co-founder, etc this website should be easy to use.

DCD -The homepage of both Data cloud and Data centre world look better and grab the users attention more than DCD’s. DCD differentiates as they have a specific website for each event and colour scheme each region making it easier for the user. DCD provide free registration but only the selected individuals are given the pass to attend. DCD want to bring the event to the customer ideally, so the reason for having events in so many different cities is to make it easier for the consumer to attend therefore, geographical segmentation is important for DCD in comparison to Datacenter cloud which don’t have events in different regions.

Consumers of DCD:

Consumer journey:

The Consumer Journey and touch points of both are different. Ella Booth was targeted on direct email by the marketing team of DCD. She started off on a touch point so all her questions were answered directly meaning she didn’t need to do any research. after emailing back and forth she was able to register for the event through the DCD website which is quite easy to navigate, then since her experience was positive she signed up for other upcoming events easily. As a consumer Ella would be ideal as she is a CEO of her company so has high level of authority within her business, which would be ideal for networking and for exhibitors to sell their innovations directly to her. On the other hand Barry’s journey was different, his exposure came from social media showing YouTube clips of DCD his next step was to research more about DCD and in the process finding the competitors websites after looking into these he called up the Companies and was told to register online once he does that he will get an acceptance email with event tickets and information. Barry chose DCD over the competitors for convince reasons. After the event he decided to give his feedback on the usefulness of the event to his needs.