Smart Content Marketing

This is CPG Insiders, the podcast that helps consumer packaged goods companies survive and thrive in business. Now your hosts, Mark Young and Justin Gerard. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of CPG Insiders. I am your host, Mark Young with my sidekick and co host. How do you like being a sidekick?

Oh, man. Does that mean I get to wear the Robin costume?

You can wear the Robin costume and I will even get your name right. Justin Gerard.

What a guy.

But it's a very French spelling though. But we did finally have a client who got the pronunciation correctly.

She was French. It doesn't count. She's cheating.

She didn't know how. I don't, I don't remember what she said, but it was not Gerard.

No, not even close. But it was probably correct.

It was like something like that.

It was way too fancy.

Okay, anyways. Well, folks, we're going to talk to you today about content marketing.

Yes.

So, Justin, tell us, what is content marketing?

So, content marketing, let's start here. There are many forms of content marketing. So that's going to be the first thing here. We hear the term content marketing thrown around all the time. And I'm sure many of you folks have heard content marketing and then you're wondering, well, okay, what is it? So to keep this very simple, content marketing, again, is anything that it's any type of content. It can be ranging from any social media. It can be an editorial piece, it can be blogging. There's all kinds of forms.

And some people refer to it as native too.

Yes, yes. Native advertising or native content is also another piece of.

It does not mean hire natives to go out and advertise.

Nope, nope, nope. I've not heard that confusion before, but in case you were ever confused, cover all the bases. You're so thorough. No, so when we're talking about content marketing here, all forms of content marketing are going to be very important. All of them have different uses. So again, what we're going to focus on today is going to be, I believe is going to be advertising campaigns that are really focused around long form content. There are many others, blogging and your social media, all of those pieces of content have value and all of them are good for your brand. But when we're looking at there are content pieces that are going to give you faster returns than others. And that's what you need to understand.

And you know what I want people to think about here and that is people get very wrapped up in the advertising world is changing and technology is changing and all of that is true. But yet what's old is new again. Because when we think of content marketing, content marketing used to be a newspaper ad.

Yep.

Content marketing used to be a catalog that you sent to somebody's home.

Yep.

So content marketing used to be the very popular model of infomercials. Yeah, yeah, that's content marketing. So when we talk about content marketing, what we're really saying at its very core is telling a story.

Yes.

And telling a story in what we'll call a long form. So short form is, you know, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, even 60 seconds is short form. And if you look at a 60 second commercial, the maximum you're going to get in there is about 170 words. And that's packing it pretty full. So what we're talking about when we say long form is being able to spend time with the consumer, for the consumer to be allowed to spend time with you. And what has changed, if anything's changed other than the technology? And let me go back to how things haven't changed. Amazon is the Sears catalog of when I was a child.

Yep. I remember the J.C. penney catalog when I was a kid.

Right. When I was a kid, you got a 1200 page Sears catalog and it had anything from mini bikes to motorcycles to go karts to new clothes to tools. And you could go through that and it was like a wish book and especially Christmas. And you go through and you look at all the cool stuff. Oh, I'd really like to have that. Amazon is just the Sears catalog.

Yes, 100% agree.

What's amazing is Sears didn't see the Internet as a threat. The company that invented at home shopping didn't see at home shopping as a threat. And the reason they did is because they went from a catalog company to a brick and mortar company and they got stuck in their paradigm. They got so committed to paying the rent that they couldn't look past the rent to realize we need to go back to what we invented, only this time do it online. And they were the people that should have done it. So we talk about content marketing, we're kind of getting back to what was old is new again. The thing that's different in content marketing today is we've learned to give things away. And when I say give things away, I don't mean give your product away. What I mean is give people something of value in your content. So when we're dealing with the Internet, we've all grown accustomed to, to being entitled on the Internet. We feel that if we take the time to sit down and Go to Google and type in a subject, we are deserving of valuable content for nothing.

Absolutely.

And I want every piece of research that's ever been done. I don't care how much money people pay for that research. I deserve it for nothing.

Well, we have more control now. We have more control over what content we consume ever before. We have ad blockers on the Internet now that we can just say, you know what? I don't want to see ads anymore. I'm done with that. I'm done with that type of content.

So when you make good content. So we're talking about content marketing, regardless of where you put it, we're talking about having a long relationship. And when I say long, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 4 minutes, we're talking about having a longer conversation with the client. But what you have to get in your head is, if I want this client to like me, if I want them to want this consumer to like me, if I want them to want a relationship with me, want to learn more about me, if I want them to think that we share an ethos, then I need to give them some serious information. Free.

Yeah.

So if you're selling product for toenail fungus, then give me some legitimate information about the causes of toenail fungus and how I could prevent it in the future and what are the best things to do. And even if it's not about your product, give me some solid advice, some solid help where I can say, okay, that was good. I'll tell you a content campaign that we did that I think was brilliant, if I must say. And that was one we did for Bloody Mary Mix.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And we created. We created recipes.

Yeah.

So we. It was great. So we created recipes for tailgate parties for football season.

Yep.

And people could go there and they could see this. This type of Bloody Mary and this one and this one with bacon and olives and celery and. And people would go on it, and people appreciated all these recipes. This looks so cool. I want to make this off the back of my tailgate at my next party. Now, how did we subtly incorporate our way into that? Because the recipe included the client's product, of course. Could you have went and made it with some other brand?

Yep.

And we never told you you couldn't. We just said, you know, add 8 ounces of this product with some vodka and with the bacon and so on and so forth. And most people. Most will come to the conclusion of, these guys are cool. I appreciate these recipes. These are really cool. I like these people. They're like me, I get them. You know what? I'm going to go use the recipes. Well, I'll try their product.

Why not?

I'll stick that in it. I don't have one, so I've got to buy one anyways.

Right.

So I might as well try it.

Absolutely.

So let's expand a little bit on some of the ways people can do content.

So there are so many different ways to do content here. So we've talked about it previously. There are what, what Mark was just describing. So you can do content that is hosted within a website or within your own brand. Social media.

Right. Could be on their own website.

Exactly. Could be within your own social media account. So you're pushing it that way. You could partner with another type of publisher if you'd want to.

You could be selling a product for diabetes and you could be working with the American Diabetes Association.

Yep. You can partner with a publisher like. Or a partner like that publisher. Like if you're selling a workout product and you want to go on to men's health because they want to reach that audience. Great. Feature my product. There's tell a new story, maybe you're giving some workout tips or maybe you're talking about different ways to recover and also hear my product is another way to help. You can do it by running a blog. Again, a blog on your site is another way that you can continue to provide content. Doesn't have to be one piece, could be continuously.

Content can be in video. Lots of videos.

Videos are great. Videos are huge.

Right. YouTube is a content site.

That's all it is. It is a huge content site there. You could even do it within display. Again, that's really short form, but you could do it within display ads within. Like you said, social media is the biggest one that you could see them in.

Let's talk about YouTube for a minute.

YouTube.

So YouTube is really a content site.

Yes.

And it's really become a video search engine.

Yes.

And it's owned by Google.

Yep.

And people will go to YouTube and they will say, you know how to change a tire.

Yeah.

Or how to replace a tail light in an Audi A7, which by the way is awesome.

Absolutely.

Because somebody's got a video on there where you can go and say, oh, look at this, I can. Somebody's demonstrated it for me.

Absolutely. I can't tell you how many different, you know, tricks or things. Being a homeowner, I was a new homeowner just going on YouTube saying, alright, so how do I replace this pipe?

Right. How do I. How Do I replace the ball in a faucet?

Exactly. I mean, it's fantastic space.

Now clients can create those videos. So as an example, you have a product, you could easily create a product how to get the best use out of your product. So you could say how to best use this medication, how to best use this styling product.

Absolutely.

Or you could get more generic and start solving more broad term solutions with your videos.

Yes, really what it comes down to is from understanding your brand, understanding your product, understanding your consumer. And once you can really get that layout, then you can see what are the types of content that my consumers engage in and what are the types of content that my product could be featured best. If you have a very simple product with a very simple problem and solution going into a long form type of content or putting together a how to video. Well, that just doesn't make sense.

So if you're, if you're selling a bad breath mouthwash.

Right.

You could do a video on the causes of bad breath.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So somebody could go to Google or to YouTube and they could type in what causes bad breath and you've got a little video there that answers their questions.

Absolutely.

And you happen to be the solution.

Which is not a bad thing.

But first you answer. The important thing is first you answer the search term.

Exactly. You've got to give them the value. You have to give consumers the value. Right. Now as we talked about, we have too much control over the content we consume and at this point we have access to too many products. Again, another thing, Amazon. Amazon has given every product out there in the world a platform to sell which they didn't have before. So now there are so many more options for consumers than there ever have been before. So therefore there's a lot of, a lot of categories now that are almost that consumers can mistakenly see as commodities just because of the amount of products that are in the category now, which weren't before. Right.

So but you could put content on your YouTube, on your Amazon page.

Yes, yes. Put a video in there. Again, how to use your product, best uses of your product, or just telling. I understand. Here's your problem. Here's probably why you've gotten to this point. Here's how you can solve some of your issues, bring it back to your product as well.

Now these are ways that we can provide content when people go searching for it.

Yes.

But let's talk about how we can use content as a way to go find new people.

Absolutely.

So these people are not at a search engine. They're not at YouTube. They're not in Amazon, but we want to go and find them and tell them what we have to offer.

Yes, yes. Everything we've talked about so far here, they're good investments of your time. They are a great way to build value not only for your current consumers and to hold on to retention, but they're great for SEO value for your site, depending on what you're doing. There's a lot of long tail value to these, but again, you're not going to get a lot of return immediately for the types of content we've talked about here. Eventually you will, but not right away. Now, there are ways if you need to move that needle quickly and right now there are ways to do that. And it's going to be more in reaching out to your consumers. And this is something that we have done many times here at the agency and I think we've done a very good job of it. Now there is video, as we talked about before, but this is pushing to more of an ad platform. So this is going on Facebook and creating an ad and pushing out and really putting a budget behind it. Those are very popular nowadays and they're very engaging. Video ads are. Video spend is continuing to go up in our industry, especially within mobile targeting, and it will continue to go up.

And we can get very specific with how we target the people. So we're not just showing it to anybody.

Yes. The Internet has given us some very creepy technology.

Now let's talk about some of these, some of the long form in writing. So when we're talking about content marketing in the written word.

Yes.

We're really talking about advertorials.

Yes, absolutely.

But instead of a newspaper, we're going to use a publisher, a digital publisher.

Yes. So Mark, if you can, you mentioned something here because up until this point we've talked a lot about the brands in their owned on the platforms. Now what is the importance of going to partner with another publisher?

Well, here's an example. Most companies have had the experience of a PR hit. So whether it was a local TV station or a newspaper or Oprah or Dr. Oz or national magazine, somebody does a PR hit, they talk about your product and you get a real lift in sales from that for a few days, maybe a couple of weeks. One of the main reasons for that lift is because it was a recommendation, it was a third party who was sharing the information about you. So I like Oprah. Oprah says this is a great book. I take Oprah's word for it. I like Dr. Oz, Dr. Oz says, this is a good vitamin. I go by the vitamin, and I'm going to take Dr. Oz's word for it much quicker than I'm going to take the advertiser's word for it. So in some of these cases, you create those third parties. So as you said, for instance, we can go, we can write a story and we can put it on Men's Health or Women's Health or Men's Journal or Prevention magazine. So let's say I'm selling. I'm selling vitamins for macular degeneration to prevent macular degeneration. Prevention magazine is not a bad spot, right? There's some credibility. This is Prevention magazine. I've heard of Prevention magazine. This is Rodale Press, and these guys are big. And it's called Prevention. And lo and behold, I'm on Facebook, I'm looking at the feed, and I see an ad on Facebook that says, you know, doctors or scientists discover, you know, necessary nutrient to prevent macular degeneration. And I look at that and I say, well, my mother had macular degeneration. Or maybe I see something that says, geneticists discover macular degeneration is hereditary. My mother had macular degeneration. Uh, oh, right. Maybe I need to read this. So I. And I see Prevention magazine, okay, this is not somebody trying to peddle me something. It's a magazine. So I click it and the story says that, you know, they've now discovered there's a genetic marker for, you know, for what macular AMD. And if you had 23andMe, you could look at this, and here's what it does, and it indicates this, so on and so forth. And then the story will say, well, what can you do? Well, science has shown that people that are susceptible to macular degeneration should be taking significant doses of the nutrient lutein and so on and so forth and lycopene. And to go through a list. And then they say, but product X here makes our new ocular vision vitamin that contains all of these essential items that are important, important for good eye health. Okay, where do I buy that at?

Right?

So it might tell me what store. It might give me a link to the company's website. It might give me a link to Amazon. It might give me a link to Walmart, whatever the case is. The beauty of this is if I'm selling my ocular vitamins, I didn't run an ad saying, buy my vitamins, right? I'm going to fix your eyes. Prevention magazine ran an ad which is More credibility. Two, you didn't run something that said, buy this vitamin so you don't go blind. You said, new genetic testing shows that macular degeneration could be hereditary. I read it. I say, my mother had macular degeneration. I should read this. I chose to participate in your ads. You didn't throw it in my face. You're not forcing me to watch it. I raised my hand and I said, my mother had macular degeneration. I'd like to know about this. I clicked it and by God, you landed me on two or three hundred words. Real news. You started off saying, in a recent study by the Harvard school of medicine, Dr. So and so, so and so geneticist discovered there are four genes that tie people back to wet macular degeneration. If you have these, your risk could be increased by 60%. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It might even say, if you have a direct parent who has macular degeneration. The odds are you have this genetic sequence. You should take steps toward protecting your eyes. If I stop there, I feel I got something of value. So I feel that I got the payoff. Clicking. I gave you my time for clicking. And I'm not upset. It's like, okay, I appreciate that piece of information. And then it says you should take steps to prevent it. Okay, what are they? And it might say, stay on a low carbohydrate diet. Don't eat a lot of sugar.

You're still providing good information.

Stay away from smoking. Reduce alcohol consumption. And then it might say, you need these five vitamins. Okay, all that makes sense. And by the way, getting back to neuro linguistics programming, stay away from smoking. Yeah, that makes sense. Don't eat sugar. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, reduce alcohol content. Yeah, that probably makes sense. And you need these vitamins. Yeah, that probably makes sense. And lo and behold, here's the company that makes them right now. Instead of pitching me something, you gave me real content that was relevant in my life and you're now making it convenient for me to follow up on this advice.

Yes.

So now it's not. You're just pitching me the vitamins. You're helping me solve a problem because I don't need to go looking for it now. You just put it in my face. Here's the company that makes the vitamins.

Especially now with Amazon. It's literally one click away, right?

Here it is.

Done.

And tell us, if we do this on a third party site, whether it's prevention, Men's Health, Popsugar, wisdom to live all of those sites have way more credibility than if you put this on your own site and run your own ads, Right?

Absolutely. And it all comes back to what Mark said earlier. If you put it on your. You put the exact story, everything to the T on your site. Compared to a third party, your site feels like it's selling something or the other site feels like it's just they're getting good information until they get to the point that, by the way, here's a product that can help you with it.

Yeah. We're seeing click through rates of 150% increases.

Absolutely. And so that's. So that was the other point I wanted to get to because you. So you were talking about the pathway to running a campaign like this, and really you laid it out. That's essentially how it works. Now, I'm sure many of you have either heard about this type of content marketing in the past or you might have run, maybe even run campaigns like this in the past. And if you're like any of our clients who have run campaigns like this, you probably run into the same struggles that everyone else has. So for one thing, if you're saying, I tried content marketing and it didn't work for me, now I'm assuming what you mean by it didn't work for me is that it didn't sell enough product, which is understandable. That could happen. And I can tell you the main reason why you didn't. Okay. It's because your campaign did not have enough reach to sell the volume of product you needed to make a return.

Or the content was wrong.

And the content could be wrong. So that's. We have to take into a part. If you went and partnered with a Men's Health or something like that, more likely than not, you got a good piece of content out of them. Might not been the best, but you got a decent piece of content.

Right. And here's what I was saying when I was saying that you've had a PR hit that increased sales.

Right.

Where content marketing really shines is think of that PR hit that you had that worked for two weeks.

Yeah.

Now imagine you could do it every day.

Yes.

And you could just keep dialing it up and down depending on how much product you wanted to sell.

Yes.

Because that's content marketing at its best. At its best, it's just like having. I just had, you know, Vogue magazine just did a story calling me one of their top 10 products.

Yes.

And I can get them to republish the magazine every day.

Exactly. Now, again, for that to Work, you have to get them to republish it every day. Now, if you combine with one of these publishers on their digital format on their websites, what will happen is you will get this campaign built for you. So let's say that it's a three month campaign. Now what's great, again, you have the credibility of the publisher. You might have a good piece of content, you've got the right audience because you picked the right publisher. But the only things that are driving traffic to that piece of content are the publisher itself. So all that's happening here is you have the publisher that has ads throughout the website saying, hey, you should read this article too.

Right. So the publisher, let's say the publisher's got 5 million readers.

Right.

The publisher puts you on the front page saying, you know, here's about wet macada degeneration and you get to grab their audience. But there's 340 million people in the country, not just the 5 million reading their website.

Exactly. So again, you're not getting the reach to really put a return on that. You might get some spike and you're gonna get some sales out of it, but it's not gonna be enough because you're not hitting enough people. So what could you do? Well, you could run ads like we were talking about earlier. Run some ads on Facebook that's gonna drive traffic to that article on that page. That's something you can absolutely do. Here's the problem that you're going to run into though. And if again, let's keep with our story. You're running this, this, this great piece of content on men's Health and you want to run ads to drive more traffic to that story because it's a great story. Men's Health is not going to let you run ads out of their, their ad manager campaign. So they're not going to say, yeah, hand over, here's our Facebook, here's our Facebook handle. You can totally run ads from our Facebook. So when people get it, it's from Men's Health magazine. Right.

So now it's going to have to come from Joe's Vitamins.

Exactly.

Not from Men's Health. I might say I can still put in the ad copy. It's Men's Health.

Absolutely.

But it's going to come from my Facebook page, not Men's Health Facebook page.

Which is not the end of the world because you can still run a good ad campaign and you can still drive some traffic, but you're going to see lower results because it's still coming from A brand. So people are still going to see the brands trying to tell me the story. Why is the brand telling me the story right now?

I could put it on my own site, but now I've got a credibility issue.

Exactly.

Because now I have a vested interest and it's somebody trying to sell me ivitamins.

Exactly. So then you run into that problem. So this is, this was a situation that we ran into here at the agency for years until finally we decided we think we have a solution to this problem. And so what we decided to do here is many of our clients here have, have heard this from us and have had successful campaigns through us on this, on this site. We created our own content site called wisdomtolive.com so what this gave us the ability to do is it gave us the ability to run the same type of campaigns, put the same type of articles, and we have the site. It's got a ton of content on there. It's got constant readers. So it's accomplishing everything that your Men's Health or Men's Journal is accomplishing. And we can run ads out of a Wisdom to Live account. So now when people see an ad for an article for one of our clients on their site, it's coming from Wisdom to Live. It's coming from a third party. So now people just think, oh, this is a great article. Yeah, I totally want to have other.

Articles there they can read.

Absolutely.

So it has credibility of them landing there and saying, okay, this is a new site.

Absolutely. And now we don't have the conversion issue from the ads of having to run it out of our clients own accounts.

Because now the ads are coming from the publisher.

Absolutely.

Now there's another big advantage when we deal with, and this is not to take away from Men's Health and Prevention. We've done a lot of stuff with.

Both of them, done great work with them.

But when we do, just as they won't hand us over, they won't toss us the keys on their Facebook page, they also don't toss us the keys to their website. So once somebody visits that article, we lose control of them.

Yep.

But in the Wisdom to Live model, that doesn't happen.

No, no. Because we own and run and maintain that site. We have access to all the data for that site, which means we can see exactly how users are interacting with the content. We can see where the drop off is. We can see where they're clicking, we can see how they're clicking. We can retarget them based on where they were and their activity on the page. So if for some reason they were reading through an article, and I'm not saying I've done this, Mark, but let's just say, for example, we're in a meeting and someone's talking for a while, I'm starting to tune them out, and I go on Facebook and I see an article that I want to read and all of a sudden, oh, I got to start paying attention again. I click away from the article. I didn't leave because I wasn't interested in the article. I left because I was supposed to be doing it.

Right, so you've got partial through the article.

Absolutely.

And most people are doing this on a mobile device.

Absolutely.

So we use something which is called scroll depth, where we actually measure how many lines, how far into the story the reader got.

Yes.

So if the story. If the reader never got past the geneticist part, we might retarget them with a story like that or with a headline like that and bring them back, finish the story. But if they got all the way through the story, then we might target them with banner ads about our eye vitamins. If they got all the way through the story and click to the company's website, maybe we'll go target them with offers of only three left at Walmart.

Yes.

Or here's free shipping on our website to conclude the sale.

Yes. Yes. Now we can build a custom messaging map based on what they've done so that we can take them to the next organic step in the purchase journey. We can't do that when we're working content with any other publisher because we don't have access to the data. And if I were them, I wouldn't give away that information.

No, you can't. You can't.

Come on.

You can't hand over the. And over your website.

No, no. It's ridiculous. So I understand why they do it.

The real bottom line on this, folks, is technologies continue to change. Yes, but people don't. If any of you have ever traveled abroad, especially if you go to places like Rome or Jerusalem or Egypt and places where you can see really ancient civilizations, what jumps out at you is that when you learn about these people, whether it was 1000, 2003 or 3000 years ago, you learn that they were still had the same lifestyle and the same concerns that we basically have. They still had families, they were still worried about their kids. They were still worried about making a living. They were still worried about being safe. They were so weird, you know, trying to be comfortable. Things haven't changed. That much all that's changed is the technology. So whenever we look at advertising, especially in content marketing, the technology is nothing more than a delivery unit. It's a delivery system. The needs of humans haven't changed. The needs to be able to learn about a product, overcome my fears, be able to make a decision, be motivated to take action. Technology has no bearing on that. That is still about making great messaging and great content. And the other thing is that it's about. It is about. Advertising is not. This goes for all advertising. It's not about, can I convince someone who doesn't need this product to buy is really about can I use technology and use medium or different mediums to locate and find people who may have a need for my product, People with a genuine need for it. Can I now educate them about why my product is superior? Can I motivate them to use it and subsequently I help improve their life? Their life is better because they just got my vitamins, they just got my painkiller. Whatever the case is, I made their life better. That's what great advertising is, telling a story to relevant people with content that will improve their life. About a product that will improve their life. All the advertising world will never make a terrible product survive. Long term, no. You can sell it short term, but eventually it will die because people don't come back.

Absolutely.

And you need people to come back. But I think that pretty much wraps it up on content marketing.

Yeah, I would say so.

If you ever want to learn more about it, you can always feel free to call us here at the agency, Jekyll Hyde labs.com We have a toll free number, 800-500-4210.

Yep.

And you can talk to Justin. You can talk to myself. There's a number of people here if you've got questions about it. Other than that, we appreciate you listening. We hope if you do like the podcast, you'll go to, you know, itunes. I heart Stitcher, leave us a five star review and we'll be back in, you know, a couple of weeks with another topic. And do we know what we're doing next by any chance?

I don't know. What are we doing? Oh, I do know what we're doing next.

Gonna talk about guarantee.

We're gonna talk about why agencies don't have guarantee.

That's what we're gonna talk about. Why advertising agencies never guarantee their work.

I don't understand why?

Why?

I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe they don't have any confidence.

They might not, but we are going to tell you why.

Well, we'll see you in the next episode. If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllhideagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-542 10.