The Money20/20 event this year seems to be even more promising than last year. I heard a few presenters and panelists last year (fewer than I would have liked as the excitement surrounding the Xopoto launch, kept us from sitting through many). This year one of the first sessions is the Sunday Spotlight which discusses “Why Every Financial Services Company Must Become a Media Company – How to Win Customers with Content”. What makes it particularly interesting for me is, this is something which we have been practicing for a while now.
With the advent of social media and its penetration amongst audiences, the consumption patterns of absorbing content have changed. Brands no longer have to depend on traditional media to get their message across. They do not need to depend on paid mediums to create awareness, affinity or even engagement. The digitization of media consumption also has formed newer groups of customers. While traditional marketing would depend on users’ vs non users, or target a certain demographic, digital media allows you to go deeper and reach out to groups beyond this. Groups which are formed on the basis of what consumers are interested in; communities of sorts. These communities could be in the form of organized groups or even scattered, linked together by a common interest area. This is where “content marketing” steps in.
Content marketing allows brands to have community interactions and engagement rather than one way message dissemination. The other benefit it allows, is the content does not necessarily need to be created by the brands. To explain this further, brands have a certain expertise that they can create conversations around. But it may not be possible for brands to own every piece of content that may resonate with their customers/communities. Therefore, one of the best ways is to use a current event or a topic to engage with the community, with a clear objective and rationale to support it.
One of our recent examples is focused around what we did around the Euro 2016 soccer activity. The biggest soccer fan population is in the MENA region. The one other thing that the football fan community does other than watch the match it with enthusiasm is discuss it with the same fervor. We used this as our tool to engage with our Arab audience. A complete web series of the matches with pre and post analysis were created with an editor a of sports daily, who discussed the match plays in detail. Not only were we able to reach out to a community (linked by a single common interest), but we also acquired over 40000 fans and generated 5.5 million views from 1.14 million unique viewers. But more importantly, we were able to grow our transacting customer base by 9% during this month long activity.
It is a need today for all brands to have a blended approach to differentiate themselves. And the best way is to have the right conversation with their customers, one that the customers are interested in.
Written by – Ashwin Gedam, Vice President – Global Marketing, Xpress Money
