For Spidey fans a trivia which says Andrew Garfield admitted to shedding tears the first time he wore the Spiderman costume shooting for The Amazing Spiderman, could be priceless. And for a startup that sells super hero merchandise, this exclusive trivia on their interactive blog could mean serious business. Stories told through videos and blogs are taking the place of advertisements for several startups that are using content to engage with customers.
"Every industry has a story to tell, if they look hard enough. And people continue to love interesting narrative," said Lakshmanan Narayan, founder of Chennai-based Unmetric, a social media intelligence platform whose company has been serving clients like Toyota, American Airlines and Lowe's. Most startups working in the online space find content-based marketing or content marketing as a medium to connect to the customer and prefer it over direct marketing. Without pitching brands directly, content marketing looks at generating relevant content that educates and creates awareness among customers.
"Content marketing allows us to engage the customers better by sharing information that is useful for them," said Rishi Khaithan, cofounder of BuildMyEvent, a Mumbai-based platform, which connects its customers to venues for their events. It also provides platforms for its vendors to connect with the customers via their blog instead of individual marketing.
"Startups don't have the money to compete with the big names," said Vikas Chawla of Social Beat, a Chennai-based digital agency delivering social media marketing and ecommerce consulting. "They have to do things in a different way either around the product or around content. Content marketing helps them to do that."
"People get sick of ads," says Pradeep Rajadas of Sociall.in, a Chennai-based social media marketing company . "Diversity keeps you engaged. So you have to start spinning stories to which customers can connect to and through which you can promote your brand," he added. Sociall has developed and marketed content for city-based real estate companies, focusing on the lifestyle, neighbourhood, appreciation of land and so on. The company has also produced content around "investment opportunities" in technology productivity hacks from tech, ROI from your latest smartphone purchase and so on for a gadget retailer.
This article was originally published in the Economic times
Priyanka Kamble2015-03-13 < Reply
Content Marketing is an important facet of net marketing, but its importance is yet to be realised by most companies
Md Azhar2015-02-20 < Reply
Yes, Content Marketing is very crucial for digital marketing strategies, but we see very few companies are investing in this strategy.