CONTENT MARKETING: FOR NONBELIEVERS
Your customers don’t care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves, their wants, and their needs. So content marketing can also be thought of this way: Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about, so they actually pay attention to you. This definition is my favorite (with kudos to bestselling author David Meerman Scott for helping popularize this), and the hardest for marketers and business owners to deal with. So often we marketers believe that our products and services are so special—so amazing—and we think that if more people knew about them, all our sales problems would be solved. Remember that your customers are just trying to solve their problems and answer the questions they have. We see example after example of businesses using this model to create content that answers the audience’s questions and then turning that into increased revenue and new business models. Just look at River Pools and Spas. It was a fiberglass pool installation company that almost went out of business in 2009. Then the owner, Marcus Sheridan, decided to start answering every question his customers ever asked, posting the answers on his blog. Now the company is the world’s largest provider of information on fiberglass pools, its installation business is global, and it is even manufacturing its own fiberglass pools. Content marketing not only improved the company’s product sales, but also created an entirely new set of business opportunities.
Another incredible example of a small business using content in a creative way is Sweet Farm. Sweet Farm is a nonprofit animal sanctuary and sustainable plant farm. Back in 2019, it was a small farm that hosted corporate teambuilding events and volunteer programs to educate the local community about the importance of farm animal rescue and sustainable agriculture. When Covid hit, visits were canceled, and the company’s revenue plummeted. It got to the point where Sweet Farm would have to start letting employees go. With its back to the wall, the company came up with a brilliant idea: a live content model that addressed the needs of virtual audiences around the world, Goat-2-Meeting. Sweet Farm let users make an appointment to bring a farm animal into its virtual meetings. With all the online fatigue people were experiencing and the amount of time people were spending in virtual meetings, Sweet Farm capitalized on this with its incredible solution.
In two years, Sweet Farm has provided 10,000 virtual events to over 350,000 people on every continent, where attendees paid from $65 to $750 to share the virtual stage with an animal. Did this save its business? Absolutely. No employees were let go as well. But more than that, Sweet Farm delivered on its mission to educate and drive change toward a more sustainable planet. All by telling a consistent story in a differentiated manner.