WTF is Content Marketing?
Someone recently asked me: how do I grow organically online without annoying the sh%$ out of my friends?
The short answer is: your social media is not for them, it’s for you, your goals, and your self-expression.
The long answer is: if you want to grow on social media, what you post has kinda gotta be for them. The way toward that is through content marketing.
WTF is content marketing?
Let me knit you a picture…starting with my rather difficult second pregnancy.
Physically, I was miserable. I’ll spare the details. But I coped by keeping my hands and mind busy in my last trimester, so I took up knitting. Not traditional knitting. The kind where you use your hands to tie giant knots without needles into chunky, aesthetic, fashionable blankets…type knitting.
To do this, I needed two things - the yarn, and someone to teach me. I got hooked (pun / irony intended) on a series of long-form youtube explainer videos from a Ukrainian yarn shop owner under a brand selling giant chunky skeins of yarn. Because I’m impatient, I started off using my own yarn I could get my hands on right away locally. I didn’t buy from her…yet.
What happened next is a content marketer's dream.
First, I signed up for her facebook group, full of real people like me sharing their designs. Then I signed up for her mailing list in exchange for one of those blanket patterns - for free! Then I’d put knitting down for months and come back to it to knit blankets for friends, grandparents, holidays, and birthdays. People can be difficult to buy for, but most everyone loves something handmade and warm and cozy.
[The name of the yarn brand: Becozi. Not a coincidence…this isn’t an endorsement in any way, just a case study]
I subscribed to her Youtube channel and consumed all her videos over time. While her content looks nice, it’s also expertly crafted. I can see the strategy: the videos are just long enough to demo the process, but not the 4 hours it takes to actually knit a blanket. She hooks her audience by showing off the finished product up front. She shows her face. Her hands are the ones knitting, her thick Eastern European voiceover takes us through the process. The video angles show the technique - close enough for me to pause, linger, experiment, and move forward and backward through the tutorial.
She takes just the right opportunities to point out why her yarn works better than the stuff I’d bought in bulk online…but not in a pushy way. Her content is branded, but doesn’t feel or behave salesy. Most importantly, the stuff she helps her users create is good. The product (the yarn) is kind of an afterthought, at least at first.
Her content was a joyful sensory experience that made me, her target consumer, feel a certain way. As a marketer, that’s what you’re selling - the feeling of something. She’s created a world not unlike the painter Bob Ross, whose happy little trees continue to garner a cult artist following long after his death. Did Bob Ross sell paint? I’m not sure, but I do know he sold his process, and sold himself as an artist in doing so. The Joy of Painting was OG content marketing.
The debilitating heartburn stage of covid-times pregnancy, as it turns out, is in fact the ideal time to nurture a parasocial relationship with a Ukrainian yarn seller! To this day, you can’t convince me otherwise.
I took on a new skill from someone with the knowledge and content prowess to pull me into her world, at a moment in my life when I was vulnerable and needed an escape. Does she know me? No, but I feel like I know her. This may all be beyond the typical attachment behaviors of a consumer, and admittedly, I feel my emotions rather deeply…or maybe I’m just brave enough to say what others are too afraid to admit out loud.
I spent two long years on her email list before buying. Last Christmas, I wanted to make my son a Minecraft blanket, and needed two specific contrasting colors of green yarn that I couldn’t find anywhere else online or in stores at a good price. And I wanted to do this without a pattern using the skills I learned through her content. How cool that I could just look at my son’s Minecraft lunchbox and just…make a blanket out of it!
just something I learned how to do online through content marketing
So I saved a coupon code, perused her inventory, and pulled the trigger when the time was right. This is a beautiful example of content marketing. But it’s a long game!
While I’m just one person in her world, it’s worth noting that I took in a lot of content before buying from her: e-mails, videos, digital downloads, posts… she did the work to position the product to me over time. Once I knew, liked, and trusted her enough to buy, I felt pretty confident that she wasn’t going to let me down.
Are you broadcasting, or content marketing?
So how is this different from how you’re doing things? What I see is a lot of people who use social media as a broadcast channel for their worlds. This usually looks like:
“In rehearsals for x and loving it,”
Or: “working on x project right now”
Do not get me wrong. This - broad awareness - is necessary to nurture your audience. This will objectively get eyes and attention on what you’re doing.
Attention is good. Attention without intention is throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Or you can think of this way: the process of showing up consistently and doing your best on social media becomes the strategy, and the creative process of making content is the payout. As a creative, I get this. I support this. But it’s not really marketing.
If you’re creating just to create, then align your expectations of what selling to an audience online looks like. You might make a few sales to your adopters, or stumble into virility. But will that video with thousands of views result in income, streams, sales, butts in seats, people in the door?
The point is - if those things are not and never are your intention, nothing in this article matters, and you can quit reading right now.
If they are, then you need a strategy like Becozi.
Here’s what you can do right now to create a content marketing strategy
Start a mailing list.
Create a mindmap. You are at the center. Your core offerings surround you.
Create a lead magnet. This can be a digital download, guide, list, or any piece of content that helps out your target audience and solves a problem for them. Do this in Canva.
Create a landing page for that lead magnet. Do this on your website, or make it in your mailing list service (“landing pages,” or “sites”). Embed a mailing list opt-in on your page. This is where people will give you your e-mail address in exchange for the lead magnet.
Go back to your mind map. For each offering, you’ll talk about it on social media.
Pick your platforms wisely: you only need two - one to host long-form, searchable content (youtube, blog, podcast, or pinterest), and one social media platform (FB, IG, TikTok, etc).
Create your long form content. In that content, point to your free lead magnet and how viewers can get it: “get your free x | something.landingpage.whatever”
On Youtube, do this in the video description
On Podcasts, do this in the podcast episode guide and podcast description
On your blog, put an opt-in form directly at the end of your article
On Pinterest, make a pin and link it directly to your lead magnet (or to your blog on your website, which points to the lead magnet).
Once they’re on your list, send them a series of automated nurture e-mails. Set these up as an automation in your mailing list. Your last e-mail should call them to your core offer.
You can choose to place lower-ticket offers or other free things in these e-mails. Welcome them to your world. Warm them up over time.
This system self-runs once you do the front-end work. You keep creating content around problems that your core and low-ticket offers solve. Keep offering the freebie (or multiple freebies!) to get people into your world. They’ve given you permission to market to them.
If they don’t bite / buy right away, that’s okay. They may opt out of your list, which is fine. They may stay on your list for two years, and it’s your job to keep delivering value, so when they’re ready to buy your lime green yarn that no one else in the world sells (this is debatable), you’re the first and obvious choice!
This is content marketing.
This is how you be more cozi (pun!) on social media without annoying the sh@% out of your friends. The truth of it is your friends are people you don’t even know, but who feel like they know you. They are your listeners, potential members, donors, patrons, subscribers, collectors, attendees, and customers.
With any luck, these people might become actual friends, and all it took was creating one free guide and a couple of strategic e-mails. That’s not salesy, that’s just offering what you have to say up to the world, knowing that the people who will care need you and what you do.
Doesn’t that feel better than saying “buy my stuff / register now / get your tickets / be our member / come in our doors / listen on spotify / check out our sale” over and over again on social media?
I think so.
Robin Anderson
