The problem is that even a simple video may cost several thousand dollars to produce — with no guarantee of success. Or you could cultivate big marketing projects — planting content seeds and paying attention to which ones grow. If your business uses content marketing, it should produce planned content for distribution across several channels. Similarly, to grow big content marketing projects, test simple, inexpensive ideas. Reddit and Facebook Groups give your business the opportunity to interact with an audience around topics. Each piece of published content is a seed — planted and growing. For example, publish an article on your blog and then promote it on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. For your company, harvest the most productive content ideas and use them for big marketing projects. For example, if your big project is meant to increase sales, look for content ideas that have contributed the most to sales. If the goal is to increase email subscribers, find those pieces of content that generate the most signups.
Content marketing can attract thousands of potential customers. One of the best examples may be the Dollar Shave Club’s 2012 viral video. It helped the business grow and may have contributed to its $1 billion purchase price from Unilever in 2016.
Unfortunately, content marketing projects can be expensive and sometimes unproductive.
The problem is that even a simple video may cost several thousand dollars to produce — with no guarantee of success. An interactive app might take a few months to develop. It, too, has no guarantee.
You could take that risk, toss thousands of dollars at a video or similar content project, and hope for the best. Or you could cultivate big marketing projects — planting content seeds and paying attention to which ones grow.
Big Projects
What I’m describing is not for content marketing generally, but rather for how to choose which content ideas merit the investment.
If your business uses content marketing, it should produce planned content for distribution across several channels. This could include, for example, posting an article each week.
Then perhaps once a year, the business can invest in long-form written content, a content-driven mobile app, or a major video project.
Here is an example. A farm supply retailer in the Northwest sells a lot of fencing materials. But it found that customers often had to come back to its store to complete a fencing project or return unused materials. The problem was that customers would under-or-over estimate the number of posts and length of fence required.
The retailer thought it could produce an app that used GPS and product information to help. Customers could install the app, select the fencing materials, and then walk the fence line while holding their mobile device or mark the fence line on a map.
Developing an app would be a major project that required research, content collection and creation, and software development. If the business decided to do it, it would also come with an opportunity cost, since this retailer could only do one or two large projects each year.
In the end, instead of moving forward with the app, the business decided to test the idea, first producing a small brochure that explained how to estimate fencing projects. The company then began measuring how the brochure affected product returns.
The brochure was a content seed that might someday grow into an app.
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