Content Marketing | Integrated Marketing Communications

Sahil Avi Kapoor | PGP 1 (B) | 20140121 136

IS TRADITIONAL MARKETING DEAD? NO, ITS NOT
Traditional marketing and all its parts, subsets, derivations and types stand at an inflection point.
An inflection point that can only lead downward. However much the industry, marketers, thought
leaders or academicians, held by an inertia of experience, historical data, limited knowledge and
apprehension about the future, try to ignore the fact, the fact still stands. Clich as it might sound
- Traditional marketing is dying a slow death. The facts substantiating the aforementioned are
immense and all pervasive.
With consumers logged onto the internet and looking for information themselves, the traditional
marketing communications are both irrelevant and futile. The target audience sitting out there
doesnt like to view an ad before viewing a video on YouTube, they skip it. Your consumer doesnt
want to hear about how awesome your product is between the overs of an India Pakistan cricket
match, he is busy tweeting away about the match. And surely, your customer does not like to hear
about any new offers that you wish to tell him about when he/ she is driving back from office.
Moreover, off late even the top leadership at the Fortune 500 companies have come to realize the
lack of credibility that such marketing campaigns bring along. In fact they have even lost their
faith in the fact that traditional marketing plays any part in generating substantial business growth.
Gone are the days when CEOs happily allocated budgets for campaigns that promised to increase
brand equity or improve brand image. Nothing can today replace the assurance of raw numbers,
hard financial metrics.
But as Philip Kotler remarked in a recent interview to the question whether traditional marketing
dead, it is only foolish to go all out on new media marketing. The companies that will ace
marketing in the future are the ones that use the right mix of traditional as well as novel forms of
marketing. The key lies in testing the optimality of how much is too much of digital marketing as
well as traditional marketing. Looking from a broader perspective, the answer to what formulates
a good marketing strategy does not and never will depend on the medium of communications.
Thus, traditional marketing, if it stands for the traditional mediums of marketing, is not dead. Only
the context, the environment, the consumer and the expectations have evolved.
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
Marketing is not about the medium, its about the value that the marketer is able to attach with his
brand and convey it to the target audience. Its about the inherent relationship that the customer
shares with the brand.

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Content marketing refers to the strategy that helps a brand to create and deliver information that
fosters trust and affinity among its target customers. It is a way to lay foundation to a healthy
relationships and sense of community among its audience. Relationships that encourage loyalty
and attachment to the brand identity. Content marketing is also a potent path towards your brand
being considered as the thought leader among competition. Putting it in as simple a language as
possible, Content Marketing drives sales without the traditional push technique or any hard
sell tactics.
WHY CONTENT MARKETING? (AND SOME AWESOME CAMPAIGNS!)
The promise around content marketing does not stand on weak ground. There are examples galore
where content marketing has shown promise and feasibility in achieving real business solutions.
1. Drives Sales Growth
Blogs, media aggregations about your industry and user generated content relevant to your brand
often defines the competitive advantage or the unique selling proposition of your brand into the
niche consumers who read about you. These consumers, having uncovered uses and appeals that
they did not know of before, produce newer sales opportunities. These niche interests and
opportunities can be uncovered using techniques like keyword mapping or social listening. These
techniques involve digging deeper into public conversations of your target audiences, so as to
unearth hidden or underlying needs and wants that your brand can cater to.
The Dollar Shave Club, a seller of non-branded razors, much cheaper but as safe and as good
as branded ones with unmatchable customer service, delivery and packaging. A video released
by the Dollar Shave Club, titled, Our Blades are F***ing Great clocked more than 10 million
views on YouTube and got them over 25000 new followers on Twitter as well as close to 80000
new Likes on Facebook. But what grabs attention and makes this a case study worth mentioning
is that the Dollar Shave Club also managed to gain over 12000 customers in just two days of
releasing the promotional video. All without spending millions on a conventional TV ad
campaign.
2. Helps Brands Retain Customers
By offering both entertainment and information, brands are offering their consumers a refreshing
experience that doesnt seem like selling. An example of a brand carrying out some stellar content
marketing campaigns is Uber.
Uber maintains a fascinating blog that talks a wide variety of things such as Uber Data An
extremely well represented agglomeration of infographics about how Uber is playing a part in
changing the public transport scenario across the world. It also hosts a wide range of city
specific blogs that talk of all things interesting and happening in cities around the globe. One
of the most read blogs had Uber compare the passengers who use Uber in various cities

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Passengers of which city are the most travelled, Which city has the most number of women using
Uber, Which city has a higher percentage of rich people using cabs and the like.
3. Build or Reposition Brands
Any repositioning exercise requires the company to touch as much audience as possible in the least
time. Moreover, the message must be delivered in a way that the company can control its effect
and lifecycle. And what better way to do it than to involve your consumer through a well thought
out and formulated content strategy in the form of a blog post, website post or email that requires
him/ her to concentrate and understand. A very recent and an extremely potent example would be
Zomato.
Zomato, in the past few months, has gone about changing their logo as well as positioning twice
over. After beautifully pulling off a repositioning that had them adopt the heart and fork logo,
Zomato went on an acquisition spree. In the process, acquiring UrbanSpoon, a food
recommendation and agglomeration service much bigger in scale as well as users than Zomato
itself. Working in developed and highly mature American and Australian markets,
UrbanSpoons brand identity was vital for Zomato to make inroads into these highly profitable
and promising markets. Thus, to stay close to the original identity of UrbanSpoon, Zomato took
to changing its logo again this time to The Spoon. And how beautifully did they do it!
Deepinder Goyal, the CEO himself went ahead to write a blog titled, The Best of Both Worlds,
beautifully articulating as to why and how Zomato is changing. This blog was then popularized
through Zomatos social presence and took no time to have all its trusted patrons onboard with
the companys ideology and vision for the future.
4. Integration
Content once created can help integrate multiple touchpoints for the brand to connect with its
customers. Such a multi-platform and cross network content placement could be manifested as a
blog post, a social media message, a print campaign or a personalized mailer. Moreover, content
could also be favourably customized for each of these platforms and bring out a truly integrated
marketing voice, that can double or triple the efficiency. Narendra Modis bid to connect with the
countrys population post his appointment as the countrys Prime Minister is an exercise in content
marketing like has never been seen before.
The Prime Minister interacts with the youth through various social media networks such as
Facebook and Twitter, sharing videos of his speeches at various meetings, conferences or in the
parliament. No government achievement or even an impending plan for the future is left to not
be shared with the nation. In an unprecedented move, PM Modi is now also on Instagram where
he shares candid pictures from his international travel or even his day to day functioning. In a
seamless integration of social media with personalized mail communications, the Prime
Ministers office also sends in a daily newsletter titled News & Updates from
dailynews@narendramodi.in. The newsletter is a wonderful tool to have the country on the same
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page as the government when it comes to key issues of governance and daily reporting of events
and progress. Not to be tied down to a single platform, the Prime Minister has also started
talking directly to the nation through his fortnightly radio programme, Mann ki Baat as well
as through regular Google Plus hangouts where he periodically takes direct questions and
suggestions from the people.
5. Long Term Engagement
An inherent fallacy in most marketing campaigns is their short term tactical nature. An effective
marketing campaign must involve the intended audience for as long as possible to build long
lasting relationships between the brand and the customer. Such a relationship gives brands an
opportunity to build steady information flows through content creation and marketing. While,
brands are able to put across messages and information swiftly, they are also in a position to
regularly gauge consumer feedback through the same communication streams. One of the greatest
example of B2B content marketing can be derived from Intel.
Intels blog that is called IQ is a brilliant platform to learn about the latest trends in design,
technology, analytics, big data and cloud computing. The blog in fact is an aggregation of
content curated by its employees who are working on live projects relating to these fields. The
blog effectively works like a discovery tool of what advancements is technology is enamoring
the scientists and the experts today. The blog, in more ways than one, is a journey into our future
and where we are headed with the massive progress being made every day.
THE FUTURE OF CONTENT MARKETING
Going by the rise of content marketing and the insane amount of success experienced by brands
practicing the same, the future of content marketing is extremely bright and promising.
The days not far when even mainstream media such as TV shows, movies and actors shall hugely
rely on the influence of social media to connect with their audiences. We have seen how shows
like Roadies have evolved from being only to TV to being available everywhere. Webisodes,
small snippets, and even full shows are available online. Music festivals such as Sunburn or
Tomorrowland that were defined as live outdoor entertainment are increasingly connecting with
music lovers online.
Let alone mainstream celebrities and shows exerting influence online, even online shows and
celebrities are fast going mainstream as they are fast producing quality content liked by the
consumers. All India Bakchod and The Viral Fever are live examples of online content creators
who are fast growing onto the mind space of young audiences through their original and path
breaking content. The AIB roast or TVFs Arnub are household entities already.
Another trend that might worry the less creative brands is that soon, the number of Likes or
Followers on the social media will not equate to positive influence. Brands can surely advertise
and gather the Likes but the absence of original, cool content on their social media handles might
do them more harm than good. After all not everyone can be Red Bull.
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