Year in Review // Integrated Marketing Edition
This year has brought each sector their own sets of challenges. This brief article isn’t about the pandemic’s impact on those sectors, but instead about the three main takeaways from The Downtown Creative’s sector: Integrated Marketing, and more specifically Content Marketing. The first two are observations of strengthening trends, the third is about the marketing goal-posts that seem to be moving over time.
Content is still King.
Yep, go figure. There’s a reason that expression exists: it’s true. Content - photo and video content, specifically - paired with a brand’s cohesive positioning/strategy is driving audience engagement. Not Google Search Ads. Not SEO. Not Click Funnels. If you are focused on those tactics, you’re missing the point entirely. There are no shortcuts in building a brand worth remembering.
Content is Difficult.
It’s very, very challenging to get right. That’s why most brands don’t have a content strategy: they hit a road block, they don’t know how to create the content, let alone figure out what resonates with their audience, and they hit the pause-button and promise themselves they’ll ‘come back to it later’. It’s difficult, and it’s difficult for a reason: content strategy and creation takes time, effort, discipline, and collaboration. Great content doesn’t come from ‘one-man-bands’, it comes from company principals working with content creators as a team.
The ‘low-hanging fruit’ has changed.
Everybody already knows ‘what you do’. That’s the ‘low-hanging fruit’, and if your content strategy is based on strictly showing ‘what you do’, then you can now check the box of ‘doing the bare minimum’. Audiences already know ‘what a company does’, for the most part. They now want to know ‘how you do it’, ‘why you do it’, and ‘who you are’.
Think about it like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. On the bottom you have needs like food and shelter, and on the top you have needs like self-actualization. In this metaphor, brands showing their audience what they do is at the very bottom of the hierarchy. Showing ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘who’, are at the top. More and more brands are realizing this and tailoring their content strategy around the top of the hierarchy, not the bottom.
In 2020, these are the three main takeaways we’ve experienced: content is still king, it’s still difficult to create, and the goal-posts of what your audience cares about are moving further down the field.
