Understanding "Content Marketing" in One Article

In which area have companies been increasing their budgets over the past decade? The answer is " content marketing ". If we ask these companies again, do you think your content marketing has achieved the expected ROI (return on investment)? Most marketers will be evasive.

I think the reason is not only that content marketing is difficult to measure with KPIs, but also because every company and every marketer has a different definition of content marketing.

When I talk to brand owners about the concept of "content marketing", they generally have three understandings:

1. Content Marketing = PR/Entertainment Marketing

Their understanding of content marketing remains at the level of H5, soft articles, and viral videos. They believe that content marketing is the best way to “spend little money and achieve big results,” and the company’s expectation for agencies and marketing departments is to “sweep the screen.”

2. Content Marketing = Sponsorship/Implantation/KOL

This understanding equates content marketing with "marketing with the help of external content resources". Sponsoring "Summer of the Band", implanting "The Longest Day in Chang'an", and cross-border cultural and creative projects of the Forbidden City are the basic cognition of enterprises. Their daily content marketing is to inventory and evaluate various content resources to see if there is an opportunity to promote cooperation.

3. Content marketing = Weibo, WeChat and Douyin

Companies understand content marketing as "attracting fans through the publication and operation of daily content." The company has clear KPI requirements for the content marketing team, including reading volume, interaction volume, number of fans increased, etc.

Aren’t these three understandings correct? Both are right and wrong, because they all have a one-sided understanding of the value of content marketing.

The first type, content marketing = public relations/entertainment marketing, is "looking for a sex partner"

Always wanting to “spend little money and do big things”, isn’t this a kind of scumbag mentality of having needs but not wanting to pay?

The second type, content marketing = sponsorship/implantation/KOL, this is "chasing goddesses"

Most goddesses are out of reach. Even if you try your best to get them, you often cannot live at home with them.

If content marketing is done in this way, the content will not be able to be accumulated into brand assets. In essence, it is still a form of resource procurement, but the money previously used to purchase CCTV prime time has been transferred to the top content.

The third type, content marketing = Weibo and Douyin, most of the time this is a "marriage of convenience"

Companies have indeed put in a lifetime of physical energy to do content marketing, but the daily heavy operations and quick-success KPI indicators have brought a deep sense of fatigue to the team. In the end, the marketing department just released some light content and fudged some small data to deal with the company, and the company's management turned a blind eye. The marketing work evolved into a marriage of accommodation.

If we always stick to the above three methods to do content marketing, your content marketing will never improve. I often feel that the depth of our understanding of something will determine how much value we can extract from it.

When faced with the concept of "content marketing", we must first clarify "why do content marketing" before we know "how to do content marketing well".

1. Why do content marketing?

1. Content = Make product value tangible

In 2018, "A Bite of China 3" was released. It did not make any particular restaurant or dish famous, but instead made a pot popular - the Zhangqiu iron pot. How popular is it? After the broadcast of "A Bite of China 3", Zhangqiu iron pots on Taobao were out of stock for a time. The orders for the iron pots forged by Master Wang Yuhai were placed in 2021 within 3 days...

The reason why this pot has attracted countless housewives is that the birth of this pot actually went through "twelve processes, eighteen times of heating, 1000-degree high-temperature smelting, 36,000 times of hammering..."

But is the craftsmanship of these iron pans really the reason why consumers are rushing to buy them? Let’s do an experiment and adjust the way we promote Zhangqiu iron pots to see if we can achieve the same effect as in “A Bite of China 3”.

If Zhangqiu Iron Pot had not been reported in "A Bite of China 3", but it had received a huge investment, Zhangqiu Iron Pot would have used this investment to place advertisements in 8 episodes of "A Bite of China 3" at a cost of 100 million yuan.

In the 15-second advertisement, the selling point of "twelve processes, eighteen times of firing, 1000-degree high-temperature smelting, 36,000 times of hammering..." was also stated verbally. So, is it possible that Zhangqiu iron woks will usher in a nationwide buying spree? Although there is no data to support this, I believe that your intuition is the same as mine, and that doing so will never trigger a buying spree for Zhangqiu iron woks.

With the same selling points and greater exposure, why can only the "content marketing" of "A Bite of China 3" trigger a buying spree? But TVC ads cannot achieve the same effect?

Because "content marketing" makes product value tangible.

We often have a misunderstanding that when a person agrees on something it is because rational thinking is dominant. In fact, most of the time people make irrational decisions. For example, many girls hated Wu Yue, who played the mistress in "My First Half of Life". At this time, the rational brain does not tell you that this is a play and all this is fake, but the emotional brain keeps dragging you into the world created by the TV series, and you can't help but believe that all this is real.

“Content marketing” can achieve the same effect. The stories woven through the content and the characters portrayed drag you into a situational world, allowing you to "empathize" for a short period of time and believe what is happening in this world.

Through "A Bite of China 3", a story full of craftsmanship and emotion, Zhangqiu iron pot has become synonymous with "craftsmanship", "handmade emotion" and "accumulation of time", making the product value of Zhangqiu iron pot visible and tangible, awakening users' irrational decisions.

2. Content = unlimited growth of traffic entrance

I don’t know if you have noticed that many Internet applications have begun to transform into content. At the beginning, Taobao was transformed into content, adding content entrances such as "Good Goods", "Good Stores Every Day", and "Taobao Second Floor", and the homepage was completely an interface based on content flow.

Soon, many APP applications also began to transform into content, such as Dianping and Ctrip, not to mention Mafengwo and Xiaohongshu, which have been strengthening their content attributes.

Apps such as Taobao, Dianping, and Ctrip are all consumption platforms, but why do they need to embrace content? The answer is not difficult to guess, because a simple tool platform has a traffic ceiling. If users only come to the platform to consume, then whether it is user scale, stay time or consumption frequency, they will encounter bottlenecks.

But once you have content, the richness of the content will create more reasons to visit. Watching other people's consumption as if reading a story, and turning shopping into an enjoyment similar to watching TikTok, users' stay time will be greatly increased; and the real consumption stories of real people are endorsements of trust, which can greatly awaken the shopping desire of other users.

Therefore, content marketing is a traffic entrance with no ceiling. Whether you are a startup that has no money to purchase traffic, or a mature company whose traffic growth has reached a bottleneck, as long as you have the ability to produce high-quality content, you can break the traffic blockade.

3. Content = the first motivation for product consumption

In 2019, the best example in the field of content marketing was the joint creation of Uniqlo and KAWS. The reason why this case is the best is not because of its explosive creativity (in 2019 when the economy was in recession, companies didn’t care about creativity at all), but because it successfully boosted Uniqlo’s sales and made the rush to buy the co-branded products a marketing event that swept the screen.

2018-2019 can be said to be the explosive year of cross-border marketing, People's Daily & Li Ning, Hero Ink & Rio, White Rabbit & Smell Library, Land Rover & National Geographic, Anta & Coca-Cola...

Why are brands suddenly keen on cross-border marketing? Is it just to create a sense of freshness? No, I think what is revealed behind this is a kind of anxiety. Contemporary brands are collectively suffering from an epidemic called "lack of content."

Most of the current brands in China are cold and lack warmth in terms of packaging, advertising, and products. And every time a brand crosses borders, it is an empowerment of product content, allowing content to drive consumption rather than products to drive consumption.

The first reason why users rush to buy Uniqlo clothes is because KAWS is printed on the clothes, not because Uniqlo T-shirts are only 99 yuan and are of high quality.

In the future, content will become the primary motivation for product consumption.

4. Content = Hidden Barrier to Competition

Being able to produce good content is a very strong competitive barrier. After all, content has an artistic element, so it does not have a production standard. Many times it is like "opening up the Ren and Du meridians". If it is open, it is open, and if it is not open, it is not acceptable.

We see that some companies can often produce "screen-sweeping" content marketing, such as NetEase's marketing team. This is definitely not something that can be achieved by simply spending money to hire a creative genius or doubling the budget.

For example, iQiyi is currently the leading company in the online video industry. Its main competitors are Tencent Video and Youku, one backed by Tencent and the other backed by Alibaba. It can be said that in terms of capital, iQiyi cannot compete with these two giants.

But iQiyi has one strong point, which is the ability to continuously incubate popular products. In 2017 it was "The Rap of China", in 2018 it was "Story of Yanxi Palace" and "Idol Producer", and in 2019 it was "Operation Ice Breaking".

This capability is a competitive barrier built up by gradually infiltrating the content industry over the years, continuously improving the team structure, and constantly conducting trial and error. It cannot be quickly replicated with capital power, nor can it be compensated for with creative strength, so it is called a hidden competitive barrier. This ability allows iQiyi to remain highly competitive amidst the competition among giants.

2. How to do content marketing well?

If we ask a marketer, how to do content marketing well? They might answer: you need to have good ideas, be ingenious, invest more budget, focus on conversion effects, and have a mature operation team...

These answers are not wrong, but they can only get 60 points. The difference between a person who scores 60 points in the college entrance examination and a person who scores 120 points is the difference between a third-tier university and Tsinghua University.

The original intention of many companies to engage in content marketing is that the effectiveness of hard advertising has declined, so they plan to use interesting content to attract users to pay attention to the brand. But "attracting eyeballs" is only the most superficial function of content marketing. Its more long-term significance is to create a "traffic entrance" and break the traffic hegemony of giants.

Once we define the function of content marketing as a "traffic entrance", it means that this entrance cannot be sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, sometimes open, sometimes closed. It must be open stably to acquire customers for the company.

Therefore, content marketing is actually a protracted war that lasts for many years, and this protracted war is not just about tactics and bravery, but also about money, food, injuries, food, drink, defecation and urination.

When fighting a protracted war, food and supplies must be sent before troops move; when doing content marketing, creativity cannot last long, as costs will affect the outcome.

That’s right, if a company wants to do a good job in content marketing, the key is to have “cost awareness”. The "cost" I am talking about is not just monetary cost, but also includes the time cost, creative cost within the enterprise, and the mental cost of investing in consumers.

The following six steps determine whether we can achieve more stable returns at a lower cost through content marketing:

1. Select content tracks and continue to invest

An athlete who wants to win an Olympic medal cannot practice long-distance running today and switch to short-distance running tomorrow. This will not only distract the athletes' attention, but short-distance running training and long-distance running training are inherently conflicting and will offset each other's training effects.

Similarly , when companies are doing content marketing, they should also focus on a certain content area, continue to cultivate it, and become the leader in this field.

For example, SoYoung APP is a medical beauty service platform, and their chosen track is "entertainment gossip". Because celebrity plastic surgery is hot news in itself, if they add some professional analysis perspectives in the article, it will be easier to arouse girls' enthusiasm for spreading the news.

Currently, SoYoung’s WeChat public account is already a top entertainment account, with the price of headline advertising being around RMB 300,000 per post.

For example, RiverPools and Spas is a swimming pool installation company. They call their content marketing track "The World's Best Fiberglass Pool Experts" and answer various user questions on their official website.

Selecting the content track is to position the content marketing. It cannot just focus on the company's products themselves, as that would turn it into self-promotional advertising. It must extend to a certain content area related to the company's products, but at the same time it cannot extend indefinitely. Because the content is completely unrelated to the product, it cannot bring consumption associations to users.

At this point, many companies may say: This is how I do content marketing, why is there no effect? For example, the content marketing of Chinese maternal and infant companies is all about parenting knowledge. Of course, the content track of talking about parenting knowledge is correct, but why has no one achieved any results?

The answer is both simple and heart-wrenching: because the content you provide is just ordinary content, not extreme content.

2. Create great content, not content

The 80/20 rule in the content industry is extremely obvious. No matter whether it is as big as movies, variety shows, TV series, and games, or as small as KOLs and emoticons, it is always the 20% who are famous and make money, and 80% of content organizations are just the foil for the 20%.

Creating extreme content does not violate the cost principle, nor does it mean that we should invest more budget and manpower. What I want to emphasize is the importance of creating explosive content, which is far greater than the frequency of content output.

When we create popular content, we are reducing the user's time cost, because they will feel that it is worthwhile and profitable to read it, and will have a strong desire to forward it, rather than just "killing some time."

For example, in 2017, the opening rate of articles on WeChat public accounts was 2%. According to the industry, "the traffic dividend period of self-media has long passed." However, the Qingshui Manga self-media Kuang Fuyao gained 100,000 followers in two days with two comics, "They Don't Talk About Reason when They Talk about Love" and "They Talk About a Lot of Reasons when They Don't Talk about Love." Why so fierce? Because his comics are really extremely good content.

Taking the account of General Liang as an example, one of my most read articles is about the interpretation and application of "brand" and "IP"... I have sorted it out, but at that time I only had 2,783 fans, but this article has received 35,000 reads and is still being reposted.

Although I only write for public accounts as a hobby and have no clear utilitarian purpose, I know the basic principles of the content industry: it's either the best or the worst.

So, it’s not enough to just do content marketing, it’s about doing extreme content marketing. The gap between content and extreme content is the gap between a pig and Da Vinci.

3. Lower the production threshold and standardize creative processes

For the advertising industry, the biggest problem with the creative industry is its perishability. All good ideas are like fireworks, too brilliant and too short-lived. Creative people must desperately subvert their past works and their past selves in order to keep moving forward.

This means that we cannot always rely on creativity to obtain stable profits. But the biggest difference between good content and good ideas is that good content can beat time. When we do content marketing, we must first distinguish between good content and good ideas.

Which is more creative: a Game of Thrones billboard or a Panasonic nose hair trimmer billboard? Obviously it's this imaginative outdoor billboard, but Game of Thrones is the real good content.

Content marketing is a long-term battle. If you rely solely on creativity, it will bring great instability to the marketing results. We must find a way to make the entire content output "standardized" and "replicable". Simply put, we cannot strive to become Michelin, we must strive to become McDonald's.

First of all, all “heavy industry” production must be abolished, that is, all content marketing models with high input but low output must be abolished.

For example, "Canned Video" and "Office Ono" are both short video self-media about food. Let's take a look at the cost differences between them:

It can be clearly seen that the canned videos have more exquisite pictures and better user experience. But Office Ono is more creative and has a stronger sense of life. The cost of both is on "shooting, storyboarding and post-production" and the cost of the other is on "creative conception".

But creativity is renewable, but money is not. Moreover, the number of views of a single episode of Office Ono is far greater than that of canned videos. Therefore, from the perspective of input-output ratio, Office Ono is more vital.

Secondly, we need to break down the production process of content marketing and make the production model replicable.

For example, Xin Shi Xiang is a leading brand in the emotional category, but through several content marketing campaigns such as "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" and "Book Throwing Operation", it has become a top advertising and marketing agency.

When Xin Shi Xiang shared their experiences, they ranked the abilities to create trends in order of importance: predictive ability, execution, and creative ability . They ranked creative ability last, and the so-called "predictive ability" is to predict what content topics users will be interested in.

To improve this ability, they summarized four methods:

(1) Collect successful research cases.

(2) Establish a high-frequency vocabulary. For example, Buddhism, housing prices, etc.

(3) Make good use of Internet tools. For example, Weibo hot searches, Baidu index, etc.

(4) Maintain a high density of creativity and execution. Keep trying and failing, and try again and again.

If content marketing is a test question, we have to turn this creative question into a math problem to solve.

4. Let the content settle and form IP assets

I have introduced this marketing method before. The biggest mistake companies make when doing advertising is that they always want to come up with new and fresh ideas to stimulate consumers. The consumer’s mind is an investment, and the key to all value investments is long-term holding and not reselling at will.

When we do content marketing, we must find ways to make the results of content marketing accumulative and sedimentable, and even form an IP-based asset. For example: Double 11, Taobao Maker Festival, Douyin Wonderful Night, Pepsi Brings Fun Home, Xiaomi’s Rice Noodle Festival, Dianping’s King Meals…

Many marketing IPs have penetrated into consumers' lives just like their brands. If we conduct a brand valuation on the “Double 11” event initiated by Taobao now, how much is its value? One hundred trillion or one quadrillion?

Companies should look for marketing content that can remain unchanged among the ever-changing creative content, and then continue to invest in it. In terms of operation, it is important to note that for marketing IP, continuous micro-innovation is required to maintain users' sense of freshness.

In addition to virtual content marketing IP, we can also accumulate character IP.

Let’s take Office Ono and Canned Video as examples. The stronger point of Office Ono is that its short video column created the internet celebrity character "Ono". Once Office Ono can no longer do business, there can still be Ono in the Vegetable Market and Ono in the Mountains. But canned video is just a column name, without any character development.

For example, from the perspective of the content industry, which program is better, "The Debaters" or "Summer of the Band"? The answer must be "The Rap of China", because "The Rap of China" has brought Miwei many celebrities such as Ma Weiwei and Xiao Xiao. These people are not only the source of traffic for the show, but also the source of monetization for the show.

Miwei relies on these talents. Firstly, it can sign economic contracts and collect their performance fees; secondly, it has created the paid knowledge column "Speak Well"; thirdly, it has derived other variety shows around these people, and also provided low-cost guest resources for the company's other columns.

Although "Summer of the Band" is currently very popular and has good traffic, these bands do not belong to Miwei. They belong to economic companies such as Modern Sky. Therefore, the main revenue of this program is estimated to still remain at the advertising revenue level.

We might as well ask ourselves, what is your content marketing consolidating? Can it accumulate some assets for the brand?

5. Optimize consumer behavior paths and reduce conversion costs

If you ask what is good content? There may be thousands of answers; but if you ask what is good content marketing, then there is only one answer : content marketing that can generate market growth is good content marketing.

If we use this standard, 99% of the cases that amaze us on industry websites are just "airbrushed drafts", while real content marketing is "ordinary in appearance". For example, let’s look at the case of UCAR.

This is a fission marketing page within Shenzhou Special Car. It looks like it only uses the official poster of "Mojin: The Lost Tomb" and has no creative content. However, this event brought 400,000 new users to Shenzhou Special Car, and "Mojin: The Lost Tomb" was a free BD resource exchange, which meant that 400,000 customers were acquired at zero cost.

Let’s analyze the visual of this page. What is so good about it?

(1) First, the visual core is <Enter your mobile phone number>, <Get a car voucher>, and <Download the Shenzhou Car APP>. Its user behavior is completely directed towards effect conversion;

(2) Secondly, its title is “Shu Qi Gives You a Special Car Ticket”, and this title remains after it is shared. This cleverly uses the popularity of celebrities to stimulate people's star-chasing mentality;

(3) Again, the content at the bottom is the user’s message + the amount of the coupon. And it is especially important to say that these messages are automatically generated by machines, rather than being filled in by users. Doing so is taking advantage of the human herd mentality, putting social pressure on new users, and showing that the activity is authentic.

From this simple visual, we can see that every detail of this content marketing of UCAR is aimed at guiding users’ consumption behavior , rather than making users feel “really interesting” or “very touching”. Content marketing means that content serves marketing, not marketing serves content.

If traffic is water, then content is pressure. Content can make traffic generate greater potential energy instead of being trapped in place; and the consumer's behavior path is the pipeline. Only when the pipeline is unobstructed can water flow to thousands of households.

In fact, in the advertising business, the core thing that Alibaba and Tencent have been doing in the past two years is to optimize the media "link". Whether it is Alibaba’s “omni-channel marketing” or Tencent’s “full-link marketing”, they are both aimed at opening up the data chain between front-end advertising and back-end business, so that platform advertising can directly lead to purchases.

Let’s take another example, the case of Tencent and Cornetto. This case may not be unfamiliar to people in the industry, because Tencent has talked about this case in many press conferences.

What’s good about this case? It is not that the customer has customized the product based on the IP, but that the customer has connected the data of offline stores and online mini-programs, allowing the IP energy of "The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation" to penetrate into every aspect of user consumption, thus completing a closed-loop marketing.

People in the corporate marketing department may know how difficult this is. It is not a question of how much money is spent, but rather about coordinating among various internal departments as well as external advertisers and channel partners.

The foundation for content marketing to be effective is to optimize the consumer's behavior path. Only when the path is shorter and faster can "content" truly generate "marketing" .

6. Don’t make content = advertising, but make content = organization

The last step of content marketing is not to market users and markets, but to market yourself. Perhaps, this should be the first step in content marketing.

If you want to do content marketing well, in fact, it comes down to building a team that has been doing content marketing. Content marketing has three levels of transformation for an enterprise:

(1) Establish a functional content marketing team

Although I have always emphasized that content marketing must have a cost-oriented mindset, if you want to do content marketing well, you cannot do it lighter, but you have to do it heavier.

If the content marketing team is broken down, six basic aspects need to be constructed, namely: community attribute users, private domain traffic channels, operation team, external resource library, technical team, and creative team .

• Social attribute users: They are the first batch of seed users of content marketing. They are the foundation for content fission.
• Private traffic channels: including social groups, mini programs, public accounts, Douyin accounts, Weibo Blue V and other broad private traffic channels;
• Operation team: Continuously operate content, data, and users to continuously optimize the actual results of content marketing;
• External resource library: including all external resources such as illustrators, KOLs, Co-Branding, advertising producers, etc.
• Technical team: responsible for the construction of basic technologies such as H5, APP, mini-programs, and live broadcast;
• Creative team: including copywriting, design and other creative content output;

Do you know why I keep emphasizing the importance of cost in content marketing? Because once we want to do content marketing well, we are building a labor-intensive industry.

(2) Product content transformation

When technologies such as the Internet, 5G, and algorithms are applied to the extreme, humans will enter the world shown in Spielberg's movie "Ready Player One". The biggest feature of this world is that the virtual world is constantly encroaching on the real world .

The more advanced human technology becomes, the more humans will abandon real life and turn to virtual life. Just imagine, many restaurants may disappear in the future because humans have invented a pill that can be adjusted to any texture and flavor according to your preferences. Do you want to eat lamb kebabs or oysters? You no longer have to choose the dishes, just select a corresponding scale on your phone.

In the future, we will become less and less dependent on the "physical properties" of products. All future consumption will be "spiritual consumption". If your product cannot bring spiritual experience to people, then your product will be eliminated by technology, and the only thing that carries the human spirit is content.

When I introduced the function of content marketing, I once said a point of view: the reason behind the frequent cross-border phenomenon of contemporary brands is the "lack of content sense" of contemporary brands.

The brand lacks warmth and freshness, which can indeed be alleviated by cross-border cooperation. But the problem is that it is impossible for brand owners to cross borders every day. Cross borders are only a painkiller for the disease of "lack of content" , not a panacea.

China's Li Ning is a brand that does a great job in "content". I have always believed that China's Li Ning's ability to rise from the ashes and become the representative of the new "national trend" is not a victory for the brand, but a victory for the product. "Enlightenment", "Rekindle", "Fierce Horse", "Travel"... these are the soul of Li Ning products and the reason why Li Ning has become popular.

For example, Xibei is also a company that combines content and products relatively well. For example, when "A Bite of China 3" was released, Xibei launched a voting campaign: In "A Bite of China 3", which dish do you think is suitable for Xibei? The voting result is "Water Basin Lamb". Therefore, Xibei developed this dish and launched "Water Basin Lamb" tasting sessions in 11 cities across the country.

Xibei’s water basin mutton is both a product and a content. This dish, like Xibei’s yellow steamed buns and Zhang Yeye’s handmade noodles, has become an internet celebrity in the food world and a channel for experiencing China’s regional food culture.

(3) Make content the DNA of the organization

When our physical pleasure can be obtained increasingly at a very low cost, is the meaning of our work still money? In the next few years, companies will have to pay their employees not only monetary currency, but also spiritual currency, and the only thing that carries spiritual currency is content.

What companies need to do is not just to attach content to products, but to infiltrate the content into every cell of the organization. Content will become the foundation for the establishment of an enterprise and will permeate all aspects including product production, brand promotion, corporate culture, and management systems.

Corporate products = the medium of content

Brand promotion = content promotion

Corporate culture = worldview of content

Management system = operating rules of the content world

Therefore, Disney is a company with the most futuristic potential because all its production and consumption are based on human "sense of meaning".

When we go to the amusement park, we don't ride on pirate ships, but experience the culture of Pirates of the Caribbean; when we go to the cinema, we don't enjoy popcorn and cola, but stories and tears; we buy a few Iron Man figures on Xianyu, and what we buy is not toys, but heroic sentiments.

Don't think that Disney is a content company, it has no reference value. In the future, all companies will become "Disney-ized". We are currently seeing this trend:

For example, why does Ali have a "flower name"? It may have been just a whim of Mr. Ma at first. But when "flower names" replace "Mr. Li" and "Mr. Zhang", the meaning is to eliminate bureaucratic culture.

For example, the company has a management tool called "morality coin".

• Each employee can receive 10 integrity coins every month, which they can use to spend in cafes and restaurants near the company, and get discounts and VIP treatment.
• However, the integrity coins cannot be used by oneself. They must be given publicly to other partners, and the company must announce why the integrity coins are given to him and explain the specific reasons.
• The company will announce the moral integrity king of the month every month. The King of Morality who receives the most Morality Coins every year can receive three extra months of salary at the end of the year.

What is the significance of getting the company’s “morality coins”? It activates employees' enthusiasm for self-management and collaboration. "Integrity coins", like point cards in video games, have become a core indicator for employee promotion, salary increase, and elimination. And everything is open and transparent, reducing organizational corruption and negative voices.

Let’s switch to “your” company, whose values ​​are “pragmatic, united, tense and lively”. This kind of content design is like bringing employees into a military camp or a government office. It would be strange if employees would be willing to come to work.

Using content to transform an organization is like building a virtual world in the real world. Allow employees to get greater satisfaction in the virtual world. If your company does not have a complete "virtual world", your employees will be attracted to other "virtual worlds", such as the game world and the animation world.

In a world where virtual and reality are intertwined, content is the only ticket from reality to the virtual world.

Let’s use another analogy to explain what good content marketing is. If traditional marketing is "shooting birds", then content marketing is "raising fish".

When “bird hunting”, there is a hostile relationship between the hunter and the prey, and official posters, TVCs and other materials are “bullets”, with which companies rape the minds of users. In the “fish farming” model, there is a breeding relationship between fishermen and fish, a relationship of mutual dependence, love and hate.

• First, when companies release valuable content, they are spreading "bait" to attract fish to gather and form a stable relationship chain;
• When the fish grow up, the company will use fishing nets, fishing rods, fish hooks and other fishing gear to catch them. Our public accounts, Weibo Blue V, mini programs, communities and other user management tools are the company's fishing gear;
• In order to avoid exhausting the resources, enterprises also need to build fish ponds. Dig a fish pond, fill it with running water, plant aquatic plants... so that the fish can reproduce and grow in a natural ecology. We use content to transform products, culture, systems, teams, channels, etc., which is to build a fish pond ecosystem.

Above, we have broken down "content marketing" into three parts, namely:

• Three misconceptions about content marketing;
• The four marketing values ​​of content marketing;
• Six steps to successful content marketing.

There will only be two types of businesses in the future: content business and data business. Big data will be the connector for users, while content will be the trigger for traffic.

Related reading:

1. New trends in new media content marketing in the beauty industry!

2. The most effective content marketing promotion skills and methods!

Author: General Liang

Source: Liang Jiangjun (ID:liangjiangjunisme)