What Is “content Is King” and Content Marketing

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which discussed the large value Netflix and their users place on the content they provide (Peers 2015). Because content becomes a source of value for customers, Netflix has expanded into their own content creation, which proved quite successful. Their original series House of Cards has generated over $31.8 million profit and gained 2.08 million subscribers for the company (McGowan 2013). In contrast, however, as mentioned distribution is of paramount importance in filtering your content through the sea of noise that is the Internet (Kramer 2011). Netflix successfully combats this issue with its clever distribution that personalizes suggestions based on an individual user’s watching habits.

4. User Generated Content

User generated content (UGC) is any type of content created by the users of a system or service. These include blogs, tweets, podcasts, videos, and much more. What makes user generated content so powerful is the fact that instead of a professional marketing team, the general audience builds and molds the brand’s image and message. This process is greatly popular with some of the most visited sites (like Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.) online tapping into this. This form of content marketing exemplifies the phrase “content is king”. Businesses aim to have consumers engage with their brand and UGC encompasses this through multiple means. Firstly it helps tweak the brand. UGC enables a business to change its practices based on the collective voice of the users and their preferences. It brings the brand closer to the community, through tweets, likes, shares and more, the community becomes more involved with the brand (Cheng, Mizil & Leskovec 2014). It also results in new content. Users are often inclined to create narratives, artworks or videos about a brand which will be shared throughout the web. This in particular advantages marketers as users can create works which can be utilised in a marketing campaign, saving a business greatly in terms of resources and time. This further builds a community as the content created and shared brings about a communal structure online (Spiegel 2012). UGC also boosts SEOs as the more content is shared about a brand, the more prominent it will be in search engines. Lastly, content marketing is fun. Traditional campaigns involve great amounts of planning, time and money whereas UGC grows and evolves in a more organic, fluid and fun way. Though businesses are giving some control over a brand through this form of content marketing and thus give way to negative voices, one can’t deny the numerous benefits it provides. UGC epitomises the idea “content is king”.

Reference

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McGowan, M. (2013), ‘Orignial Series Help Netflix Turn a Tidy Profit’, Ad Week. [ONLINE] Available at : http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/original-series-help-netflix-turn-tidy-profit-148836 [accessed19 May 2015 ]

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Perelman, J. (2014), Content Is King, But Distribution Is Queen, 99U. [ONLINE] Available at: http://99u.com/videos/23015/jonathan-perelman-content-is-king-distribution-is-queen. [Accessed 21 May 2015].

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