Category: Content Strategy

Why You Should Invest in Content Marketing

As our team continues to reflect on recent marketing trends to strengthen future models, there’s no doubt content marketing will continue to accelerate our clients’ growth while strengthening their positions in the marketplace. Here’s why you should invest in this ROI-driving strategy.

Especially in recent years, content marketing has proven itself as a valuable asset to a marketer’s arsenal, serving its purpose to increase brand awareness, generate leads and grow sales and nurture engagement at every step of the marketing funnel.

In fact, HubSpot’s 2021 marketing report found that 28% of those who responded to their survey planned a new investment in content marketing for 2021, up 17% from 2020.

Still not sold? Allow us to offer up why we deem it a critical and profitable strategy for your organization.

Content Marketing as an Investment

Providing useful, valuable content is a key part of our strategy and services. Whether we’re crafting an eBook, social media ad, infographic, white paper or even this blog, our creative team’s primary focus is to understand our clients’ target audiences and curate content that speaks to them.

After the turbulence of 2020, we are not surprised that businesses are investing in content marketing more than ever before. 82% report actively using content marketing this year, up from 70% last year.

These numbers echo what our team has always put into practice—content marketing is, and should be, an investment that companies can’t afford to overlook.

Why, you ask?

We’ve engaged with organizations who view content marketing as an ineffective strategy. Sometimes, they simply don’t have the time to invest in creating consistent content, or they’ve been burned in the past by content marketing professionals that didn’t deliver.

Some are impatient and desire immediate, long-term results from a short-term strategy, and lastly (and most commonly) they often don’t know where to start.

That’s where Giant Voices comes in.

We understand crafting high quality content is a critical piece to our clients’ success. For our B2B clients especially, content serves a higher purpose in securing leads who then move down the marketing funnel into the sales funnel, becoming a customer.

Content Marketing Success

Content marketing is not only about having great, informative content. How you promote it or use the content to drive leads is equally important.

One Giant Voices client has a large library of well-written, industry-specific content designed to cultivate interest in using their materials and products. Our team helped this client build a lead nurture strategy for various target audience segments, leveraging specific content and topics as they move through the different stages of the marketing funnel.

Along with a solid strategy, we developed a comprehensive lead scoring system to evaluate prospects, nurture them into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and ultimately pass them along as warm leads to sales, where they move through actions to become sales qualified leads (SQLs).

Lead scoring allows us to track contacts throughout their journey, and identify which content pieces, or combination thereof, drove them to take action. Content backed by metrics and data tells a larger story of consumer behavior and enables marketers to create stronger and better performing content.

Embrace Content Marketing

Content marketing isn’t slowing down. As we look ahead to the state of marketing and where content fits, we anticipate brands will work harder across all mediums to include fresh, mission-focused content that will not only retain attention, but drive profitable outcomes.

Video content will continue to capture people’s emotions and attention, and social media will continue to be the #1 channel used in marketing (more on social media strategy to come!).

Interested in learning more about elevating your content marketing strategy? Connect with us to start driving Giant results. 

The Anatomy of an Ad Headline

Writing less is harder than writing more.

At Giant Voices, we believe in creative driven by strategy. The most important metric for an ad, brochure, tweet or outrageous guerrilla stunt is not oohs or wows or industry awards—it’s client results.

That’s why every single word in everything we produce for a client has strategy and sweat equity behind it.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at a strategic, effective headline. Taking care with every detail of creative is an example of how to communicate your brand effectively.

Creating a Strategic, Effective Headline

Goals of an ad headline

When creating an ad, you only have a handful of words—sometimes just two or three!—to:

  • Seize and keep a death-grip on the reader’s attention
  • Maintain the brand personality
  • Stay consistent with the larger strategic marketing campaign
  • Avoid cliches
  • Work with the art
  • Speak to your ideal target market
  • Persuade the reader to take a certain action

Basically, if you’re doing them right, headlines are the copywriting equivalent of one of those cooking reality shows where wannabe celebrity chefs have to conjure a five-star dinner out of yak fillets, pineapple rings, and a crocus.

Example of strategic ad headline writing

The strategic goals that drove this specific headline

  • Maintain consistency with established brand characteristics, among them brief, serious-sounding headlines with subtly surprising double meanings
  • Position spring waterfalls as an attraction
  • Frame their fleetingness as a feature, not a bug
  • Intrigue viewers enough to get them to read the body copy (and click the ad)
  • Distinguish this ad from other destination ads.

Why this headline works

Our Creative Giants came up with dozens—literally—of possible headlines until they arrived at this one. Let’s examine why this works: 

  • Positioning (copy must work hand-in-glove with art, which is the proverbial whole ‘nother conversation)
  • Brevity invites engagement (because it’s so short, reading it requires only a small commitment of time and attention)
  • Conveys value
  • Conveys urgency
  • Consistent with past ad format
  • Familiar phrase rendered in a sleek, restrained type and paired with an unexpected image creates curiosity
  • Double meaning creates a little burst of pleasure when it “clicks” in the reader’s mind 

When you’re next creating an ad headline for your brand, take these notes into account to find the right messaging that both delivers results and meets your expectations.