Integrating Content Marketing with Traditional Marketing
With so many companies finding success with content marketing, they have quickly created various strategies that integrate content marketing with traditional marketing tactics. Whether in the form of television, print, and radio advertising – it’s become clear that while working together, these two strategies can help businesses fully express their brand and convert more prospects into paying customers.
The golden era of television, print and radio advertising isover. Online content that is reactive and engaging content should pair with the exposure that comes from traditional advertising. With content marketing, your quality content can be used as a new form of advertising, known as native advertising.
What is Native Advertising?
Today, brands are creating various types of content (video, blog posts, audio clips, etc.) that promotes their brand or product in the context of what else is on the current webpage.
For example, you will see a lot of native advertising on Buzzfeed, who has now become famous for the practice. Remember that popular Pepsi Super Bowl Bingo post earlier this year? Pepsi was able to create awesome content that was also heavily branded. If you are on a Brands are producing more and more of this type of content both on- and off-domain to effectively increase engagement with their brand.
BuzzFeed has extensive knowledge on commercializing content – most, if not all of their revenue stream comes from this strategy. It’s so successful that the content giant also funds programs in the US to educate other brands on how to produce great content for marketing.
How do you spot it?
Some brands have done a really great job at creating sponsored content that is relevant, and still provides value to follows on Buzzfeed. I want to mention here, although the examples below can be considered “bigger” brands with a larger budget, native advertising does not cost as much as traditional marketing (such as TV or Radio spots) – Any company can create sponsored content and distribute it to help promote or market their brand.Here are a few examples of Native Adverting you will see on Buzzfeed:
General Electric (GE)
Pretty interesting headline, right? I would want to click on that! But if you take a closer look – notice how much Buzzfeed allows them to promote their brand, just by creating an awesome article? They have a link to their “3D Print my Gift” page in the description; a link to their website, Facebook page, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest; the best part, is that they received massive enagement and views because they were able to publish on a distribution site like Buzzfeed. GE has over 20 of these featured articles on Buzzfeed which have all found great success.
Swiffer
You think Swiffer is trying to promote their “Bissell Steamboost”? This is a bit spammy, even for a larger brand like Swiffer that sells many different products, I think they could be a bit more diverse with their strategy. However, with each of the articles they published on Buzzfeed, they received a huge response and greatly benefited their marketing efforts for this, thing.
GEICO
Swiffer could have taken some notes from Geico’s native advertising campaign. Geico must have a pretty big client-base in the Phoenix area; in this example, they do a great job at creating some geo-specific content that relates directly to their targeted audience. The topic and title is open for objection and opinion, which helped generate a lot of engagement and comments for this post. And again, this brand received all the benefits of sponsoring content for Buzzfeed with native advertising.
Use Traditional Marketing to help Promote your Online Content
Buzzfeed isn’t the only way to integrate content marketing with traditional advertising; some big name brands have created unique ways for merging traditional advertising with their online content. Take HTC-One’s “Blah Blah Blah - Go Ahead, Ask The Internet”commercial released earlier this year. In this popular TV ad, most of the air-time is spent saying “blah” – and it’s main point is to not only sell a phone, but to get the audience engaged with their online content. HTC is so confident in their online content, they have merged their traditional TV advertising to support their content marketing.
This is a great example of how major brands are working to bring both content marketing and traditional advertising together. HTC spent a lot of money for those TV spots, only to say “Blah” and “Go ask the Internet” – but that should show you have valuable online content marketing is. So even for brands with a smaller marketing budget, the merger of both strategies can be effective and successful for any niche.
Creating quality content and promoting it through Facebook and Twitter is an effective first step toward advertising your brand. But finding ways to incorporate different tools, such as distribution channels, can allow you to share even more new content for potential customers or followers.
The difference between traditional promotion and content distribution is that promotion is all about generating hype around your content, while distribution is a matter of finding a lot of different ways to get your content to appear on different sites or platforms. These platforms can include sites like Buzzfeed, or curated-sites like Alltop.com.
By integrating traditional marketing with your content marketing strategy, you will have the opportunity advertise your brand through content to an even larger audience. In fact, your branded social media profile on Facebook, or your YouTube video, or a sponsored article on Buzzfeed might just outrank similar content on your own website in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If you have a diverse marketing strategy, you can drive more conversions and leads with that awesome content!
Brad Kuenn is a Content Writer, Editor and Strategist living in Nashville, Tennessee, and he provides research, content topics, writing, editing, and content development expertise to clients. He has a passion for writing as well as art, which shines through in his work. His creativity and attention to detail makes him a valuable asset for a wide range of clients. During his time off he enjoys spending time with his wife, family, and his two dogs Brutus and Kane.
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