A royal crux: who or what is king?

How many times have you heard that content is king? Do you believe this to be true? The thinking here, and I won’t elaborate, is that brands can no longer simply broadcast advertising messages and hope a target audience will retain the message and make the decision to purchase the product or service. In order for ads to succeed, they need to be engaging. In a world where technology changes every minute of the day, marketers must strive to adapt ads for the consumer. Draw your audience in with more than just an offer, logo, and a link (Beck, 2012).

Although engaging content is highly effective, it certainly is not king.

Brands are wise to invest in content development, but it is not the only strategy that needs to exist to reach conversion goals. Greenberg described the importance of “pages that are optimized for given content” (Greenberg, 2009, para. 9), meaning that you cannot simply develop the content, you need to also publish information on an optimized Web page. This will help to increase traffic to your site, and without the right platform, there may be a disconnect between the content and your website. This is an important piece, and it certainly will help to increase the number of people to your site, but it is not the only thing to consider. It is much more complex and integrated.

You need to think through the entire consumer decision journey, that is, each stage of the purchase life cycle. A consumer’s mindset is different at each stage and it takes methodical, meticulous strategies to retain and continue winning beyond the initial purchase.

The Internet has upended how consumers engage with brands. It is transforming the economics of marketing and making obsolete many of the function's traditional strategies and structures. For marketers, the old way of doing business is unsustainable (Edelman, 2010). What has changed is when—at what touch points—they are most open to influence, and how you can interact with them at those points (Edelman, 2010).

Hey kingdom, this is the golden key to the castle.

Knowledge of the different stages of the journey, touch points, and consumers' mindset at each stage is what opens the gates. But you still have a lot of work to do, so your customers are not intimidated or dissatisfied with the interior decorating of your fortress.

Take a moment to consider this idea. Let us imagine that you have developed highly engaging content and have a clearly defined target audience and understand the touch points to reach them. You implement your content marketing strategy at each stage along the consumer decision journey and increase engagement among the target audience. Now there is a conversation. The conversation is the drawbridge that gets them across the moat.

Conversation is vitally important. It is your brand’s response, its persona, and it creates the opportunity to build a strong brand connection. But, it is still more than content marketing along every stage and more than timely engaging responses to your audience. It is about the relationship and of the long-term kind. Now it may seem in the beginning that you have butterflies in your stomach, but we all know, relationships are not easy. It is incredibly easy for consumers to become influenced, changing their decision at any moment along every stage of the journey, including developing remorse after the purchase.  

• Brands must first define its persona to guide content development and tone.
• Content needs to be developed with the stage of the journey in mind and specific goals and desired conversions need to be established for each major piece of content.
• Brands need to respond to the audience in a way that builds trust and affinity while continuing to keep the stage of the consumer decision journey at the core of the conversation.
• The customer experience needs to be a seamless transition that is consistent with the romance that took place prior to the marriage. Do not give up. Do not let them down. You must continue the positive experience in the service you provide and the resources that become available to new customers. And for the greatest impact, brands should integrate opportunities throughout the customer experience to create advocacy and increase word of mouth as they continue to impress. 

Content is not king. Conversation is not king. It is the love story. It is about trust. It is about not letting go and working hard to make it work. Relationship is king.

References:

Beck, A. (2012, November 15). If content is king, make brand advertising your kingdom. Retrieved on February 3, 2013, from, http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2224983/if-content-is-king-make-brand-advertising-your-kingdom

Edelman, D. (2010). Branding in the digital age: you’re spending your money in all the wrong places. Retrieved on February 3, 2013, from, http://hbr.org/2010/12/branding-in-the-digital-age-youre-spending-your-money-in-all-the-wrong-places/ar/1

Greenberg, M. (2009). Content is king of social marketing. Retrieved on February 3, 2013, from, http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/