Today’s consumer, empowered with more information and choices than ever before, expects more from their brands than just clever ad copy and solid branding.

With an abundance of choices and information, consumers are fastidious when it comes to buying decisions. And all that competition means that gaining market share is harder than ever—especially if you’re up against industry heavyweights. Consider the fact that in 2010, the average consumer spent three hours researching products before making a purchasing decision. By 2019, that had become six hours. The numbers are only going up.

The good news about this is that all those hours spent researching are also hours that a consumer will spend getting to know your brand—if you can get Trollishly and keep their attention. Enter Reels content marketing in 2020.

What is Reels Customised Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing—bringing the consumer to your brand, rather than blanketing the airwaves or internet with advertising and hoping some of it sticks.

The Instagram Reels-based Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

That most important adjective there is “valuable.” Valuable content is key. With content marketing, you’re promoting your brand’s value—not your product or service. When a brand’s value is in the spotlight, selling fades into the background. And that’s what today’s consumer wants.

Why Should you Have a Reels Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing helps businesses increase their website traffic, grow brand awareness, generate new leads, and so much more. Even a single blog post can reap enormous benefits for your company. Here are just a few. Increases the number of pages on your website for Google to “crawl,” thereby increasing your chances of showing up on the first page of Google results for a given search term

Can offer potential customers information they need for whatever stage of the buying process they’re in. Increases the chance that other sites will link back to your site, as others can cite your blog post in their content. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to build your brand and define your voice. Customers want to know you’re credible. Credibility and content go hand in hand.

Creating Reels Strategy

The following steps can help you get started on creating a content marketing strategy to win market share.

• Determine your target audience/audiences
• Who are you creating content for? What audiences are you trying to reach?
• This is where buyer personas come in handy.
• Using your buyer personas, research what types of content people who fit those personas are consuming.
• Browse industry publications, do hashtag searches for relevant topics on social media, use a social media listening tool like Hootsuite, and take a look at the content your competitors are posting.

 And of course, if you can get answers straight from your customers themselves, do it! Send out a survey to your existing customers through a tool like SurveyMonkey asking them about the types of content they’re enjoying from your brand, what they’re not enjoying, and what they’d like to see more of. You can even add in questions that allow them to submit specific content that they like from other brands, which can help guide your development process.

Once you’ve done your research, you should have a good idea of the types of content that your audience is consuming. Then, focus on developing two or three types regularly. No matter what, one of those types of content should be blog articles, posting a minimum of three per week. 

Whichever types of content you choose to focus on, having a variety of content at your disposal will help you reach and engage your different audiences—not only the people who come to you for different reasons, but who come to you at different stages of the buying journey.

Going back to your buyer personas, focus your attention on their pain points. How can your content help resolve your customer’s pain points?  Conduct surveys to find out how your customers found you, what problems they were experiencing before, and how they would recommend your product to a friend. Pain points will be different depending on your customers and your product or service, of course, but they can be grouped into four broad categories:

Financial: Prospects/customers need to reduce the amount of money they’re spending on their current product or service

Productivity: Prospects/customers are spending too much time using a product or service, and want something more efficient

Process: Prospects/customers want to streamline internal processes or improve business systems (this is important mainly for B2B)

Support: Prospects/customers need better support at one or more stages of the buying process

Once you’ve identified the pain point (or points) that your brand can solve for them, you can start creating content that helps guide them to you. Let’s say your brand offers an HR tech solution, and many of your current customers found you because they needed a streamlined way to manage hiring and payroll (a process pain point).

Use Reels content to differentiate your brand. What makes you the expert?

This is a great place for customer testimonials. Include these on your website, blog posts, and social media. Again, always focus on the customer while emphasizing your strengths. Show them how your company will invest in their story and success.

Which Reels Formats will Best Support your Goals?

While blogs and social media posts are critical elements of any content strategy, case studies, white papers, infographics, ebooks, and videos should also be in your content marketing arsenal. You’ll know which formats to invest in first from your customer surveys and buyer persona research. 

Blogs, like the one you’re reading right now, work best when they’re updated frequently—aim for three times a week. Again, look to your audience for inspiration on what to write about. Write how you speak, clearly and directly. Case studies are a great way to show your value by sharing real-life examples of your company helping customers.

Publish stories that your ideal customers can relate to. Use an easy to read format—bulleted lists of results, for example, rather than lengthy paragraphs—and be as specific as possible. We recommend dedicating one page on your website to case studies.

Infographics are great when you have data to share from a recent report or survey. Videos are most likely to be shared on social media above any other type of content.