[Second Half 2020 Edition] 5 Points for Content Marketing That Doesn't Fail [Worth Paying For]

This time, under the title "[Second Half 2020 Edition] 5 Points for Content Marketing That Doesn't Fail [Worth Paying For]," I'll cover how to run content marketing for the new era without failing.

Who this article is for, and what you'll get

Who it's for

Business owners and managers who fit the following:

Conversely, if you "want to get by for free," "make excuses not to do it," "are satisfied with the status quo," "run a commodity business," or "sell cheap," I can't help you, so please close this page here.

What you'll get

That's roughly it.

Too embarrassed to ask now: "What is content marketing?"

The term content marketing began appearing frequently online around 2012–2013, but let me go over it again.

Roughly speaking, by continuously sharing information on social media and owned media, you can:

It offers advantages like these, and many people use it (this site is one example of content marketing).

By the way, as content marketing media you may picture digital ones such as social media, blogs, email newsletters, and YouTube, but analog media such as newsletters, magazines, and booklets are included too.

The changes happening in content marketing now

To give the conclusion in a word: the shift to internet video and audio.

Video is taking the king's position on the internet

As for video, those with sharp ears for information will know well: watching video on smartphones has become the norm, and during the COVID crisis video viewing time increased even further.

Also, though not in the sense of content, with the move to telework, video calls have become a common way to communicate.

The internet and video are already a set, and this movement can no longer be stopped.

Audio media are also on the rise

Meanwhile, big growth is expected for audio media going forward.

Source: The digital audio advertising market will be 1.6 billion yen in 2020 and 42 billion yen in 2025 | Digital InFact | Research, evaluation, and market estimates for the digital industry

The rise of audio media makes sense in some ways.

When we watch internet videos, we are often "watching while doing something else," and at those times what we use to consume the content is our "ears."

Also, the strong sales of wireless earphones like Apple's AirPods Pro—which I use and love too—suggest that audio content has the potential to become popular.

New price: ¥29,000 and up (as of 2020/10/6 13:31)

This is a slight digression, but they are actually the audio device I recommend most for online meetings such as Zoom.

That's because they block out sound well and don't have the annoyance of a headset.

They struggle with long meetings and webinars, but you can still go close to five hours without recharging.

For business use, sharing information through podcasts is already routine overseas, and there are even rankings of business podcasters.

Top 25 Business Podcasts for Entrepreneurs

Overseas marketing trends often arrive in Japan a few years later, so if possible you want to start sharing information through audio media early.

In fact, Voicy, stand.fm, and himayala are platforms where many Japanese people are already sharing information.

Is text content over?

So should you stop text content? I think the answer is NO.

Certainly, around 2018 to 2019, there were many cases of top bloggers entering YouTube with the words "blogs are over" and succeeding.

However, text content should survive going forward, even as it loses some of its former momentum.

The reasons are as follows.

The drawback of video and audio: it is slow or troublesome to reach the information you want

We living in the internet age have a desire to reach the information we want as quickly as possible.

Video lets you consume the content itself faster than text, but it is slow or troublesome to reach the information you want.

For example, when you're looking for a tasty-looking restaurant at a travel destination with your smartphone in hand, looking at a roundup site with embedded map information is overwhelmingly faster and more reliable than watching YouTube.

YouTube now lets you add a table of contents (timestamps) to video content, so improvements are being made to help you reach the information you want faster.
There also seems to be a theory that YouTube's algorithm favors videos with a table of contents.

The email newsletter: a legacy tool, yet one of the strongest business tools

Even with the rise of video and audio media, email newsletters are one of the strongest information-sharing tools.

I have heard many times in the past that "nobody reads newsletters and nobody responds," but for strengthening relationships with customers and getting results in sales, there is no medium as useful as the email newsletter.

With the newsletters I have actually run, too, open rates over 30% and conversion rates over 10% are not unusual.

Paid newsletters, starting with those of Takafumi Horie (Horiemon) and Tsuyoshi Takashiro, are also doing as well as ever, and the newsletter platform Mag2 even went public in September 2020.

"Paper" content gets read more easily

Text content shows its true worth offline too.

Honestly, online is now overloaded with information, and information senders are locked in fierce battles with each other, so "getting seen far less than you imagine" is not unusual.

For example, you post a blog article, but SEO has become an unwinnable game so you can't earn page views, or even if you get 1 PV, it isn't read carefully, making it doubtful whether you can really call it 1 PV.

But if you only collect your list online and provide content to prospects offline, you can raise the proportion of careful reading.

People react differently to things that have physical substance and things that don't, and some people find value in bound printed matter, so you take advantage of that nature.

Video and audio media have grown in their share of use, but they don't oppose other media; they coexist.

Each medium has its own characteristics, so it's best to complement them with multiple media.

There are all sorts of ways to complement them, like these.

By the way, social media sits in an intermediate position, and it's fine to think of social media as a point of contact with users.

When Facebook first appeared, people said owned sites and blogs would disappear, and when LINE appeared, they said newsletters were finished, but they do coexist after all.

Share information on every useful medium

So the conclusion is that in content marketing, the question is not "which medium should we use," but rather it is optimal to do it on every medium where your prospects exist and complement each one's characteristics.

Also, prospects differ in nature from medium to medium, so using every medium makes sense in terms of preparing every entrance.

However, when the talk turns to this, the image of how much effort it takes keeps swelling, and there are quite a few cases where nothing gets started at all as a result.

3 points for content marketing you won't give up on

Keep these in mind and you'll be fine.

The goal is leverage, not customer acquisition

Some people may picture content marketing as achieving free customer acquisition through blogs or YouTube, but it's better not to expect that.

That's because for customer acquisition, spending money on ads and optimizing them gets results faster.

Of course, if your organization is good at analyzing Google's and YouTube's algorithms, can devote lots of time and staff, and can keep up a full commitment (daily updates), I think it's perfectly fine.

However, being in a state you can't control — your customer acquisition being jerked around by algorithms, or recently, large companies entering and taking the top rankings — is not good.

Instead, I recommend using content to leverage your business.

For example, it is said that "people come to like others more the more contact they have (the Zajonc effect)," but doing that in a labor-intensive way is quite hard.

However, once you create a piece of content, you can repeat this to many people as many times as you like.

If you compile "frequently asked questions" as content for customer support, then when a frequently asked question comes in, you just point to that content.

Also, well-received content sometimes gets introduced by loyal customers to their acquaintances on their own, and new customers are born as a result.

In other words, you take on content marketing to gain "leverage" that reduces your daily labor, raises productivity, and lets you monetize your business with high-quality customers.

It's fine if you can't keep it up every day

Some famous bloggers say that "continuing without missing a single day is essential."

Certainly, in content marketing it is true that "the more you pile up, the sooner you feel the effect," "you need volume to get good at sharing information," and "building the habit is the key to continuing," so you could say it is completely sound.

However, whether you can easily keep it up every day also depends on whether it plays to your strengths and on the effort and time you have available, so setting "continuing every day is a must" leads to quite a few cases of giving up.

So what should you do? Outsource the effort-heavy parts without hesitation.

For example, make the content interview-style so all you do is talk, and have someone else handle all the work of filming, transcribing, editing, and uploading.

You have to think about what the content will be yourself, but you can surely talk passionately about your own business, so you won't be tearing your hair out.

If it runs long, you can split the content, or you can decide on a content production day and do it all at once.

In other words, the best thing is to build a system that lets you keep going without even thinking about it.

Reuse one piece of content across every medium

To repeat, I wrote that "it is optimal to do it on every medium where your prospects exist and complement each one's characteristics."

Put another way, this means you can reuse one piece of content across every medium.

This is something American direct response marketer Felicia Pagesh drew as a diagram in a live video, which I redrew myself.

Felicia said, "Once you create one webinar, you can spread it into all this content," but the first thing you create doesn't have to be a webinar.

For example, you can compile the contents of emails into a blog post, or use the compiled blog post as a script to create a webinar — you can spread content across every medium.

Also, for converting content in ways like the following, you can use outsourcing:

However, for "extracting just the audio from a video" or "transcribing from video or audio," technology has developed quite a lot now, so you can get by with tools.

Extracting just the audio from a video

 Just use "export audio only" on the video data in video editing software.

If you need to edit the audio, you can do it the same way as video editing, so it is probably the easiest.

If you want to export only the audio from multiple video files at once, Wondershare Uniconveter is fast and recommended.

Transcribing from video or audio

There are all sorts of transcription tools, starting with the familiar Google Docs, but accuracy varies quite a bit by tool, so if accuracy is low it can actually create more work.

Rather than using free ones, it's good to try several well-reviewed ones on free trials and adopt one if it seems usable.

RIMO voice is a transcription tool specialized for Japanese, a service that can produce transcriptions at a practical level.

There is also a tool called Vrew that generates on-screen captions from video.

By not only outsourcing to people but making full use of the power of technology, you can run content marketing at low cost and with speed.

Summary

And to add one very important thing to this:

We are not artists.

Content is merely one item you use to sell, and "(on the premise that there are no legal or ethical problems) in the extreme, anything goes as long as it achieves the goal of selling."