Content Marketing is about building an Ideas Store Next to Product Store

Ben Worthen of Message Lab talks about a case study of big software company where he & his team have been getting to know the audience & figuring out what ideas resonate most with people .By doing so Message Lab has been able to get to a point where they can, with regularity, create an article that people are going to spend some time with.

Ben points out that true engagement happens when a customer spent meaningful amount of time with a story. That is the thing that’s most likely to get them to come back.

In this case study & other work Ben found out that if people spent more than a minute and scrolled halfway through an article, they are three times as likely to sign up for the email newsletter than someone who hasn’t. People who have hit that benchmark, and then seen another article in the same session are 12 times more likely to sign up for our email newsletter. This is important since the people who had been to the website once, less than 1% of them become a qualified lead for this client. Of the people who had been three times to the client website , 9% of them people become a qualified lead & so on , so forth .

Ben advocates the setting up of a metaphorical ‘Ideas Store’. Companies usually have a product store and everybody knows what your products are. But Message Lab advocates building an ideas store, an editorial sub-brand, that helps people engage with the company’s ideas .

The question that Message Lab asked that client was “Okay, if you had a store next door that was just your ideas….what are the ideas that would be on the shelves, what are the experiences that you would be creating ?

Ben points out that it is not enough to make someone a customer of your ideas store. You want your audience to become a repeat customer to the ideas store, encourage loyalty to your ideas. And over time (as he observed in this case study after 3-5 times ) the customers of ideas store, also start getting curious about the products store, and started checking out the product store on their subsequent visits.

Ben believes that one of the key objectives of content marketing is to encourage people to come back and become repeat customers of your ideas, in order to have permission to sell to them !

Listen to Ben Worthen on Our Youtube Channel