CONTENT MARKETING: The top 7 things you can learn from our national award winning campaign.

Content Marketing – these words just keep coming up time and time again don’t they?

Well they came up for us in a HUGE way last week as Threesides in partnership with our client the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service won the Australian Marketing Institute Award for Content Marketing for the 2014 Wild About Whales campaign.

We were up against some very tough competition for this award and the judges noted that our entry “demonstrated the use of integrated channel and content development using and repurposing content across a range of channels and against marketing objectives to build the target community and generate increased visitation of NSW national parks over the winter months.”

Through our strategic approach to content marketing, we helped achieve campaign-level objectives for National Parks such as increasing visits to the website, increasing bookings for coastal national parks’ accommodation, growing their enewsletter database and increasing social media likes and engagement.

So what can you learn about content marketing from our nationally award winning campaign for Wild About Whales? Here’s our top 7 learnings:

Understand your target market and their needs – we analysed the content needs of National Parks’ target markets and ensured content was matched and promoted appropriately.
Find a hook for your content – in our case, the hook was the whales. National Parks recognises whale watching as the perfect hook to encourage visitation to national parks during the non-peak colder months, and so lots of visual inspiring content about whales gets people interested to visit the parks.
Ensure all content is RITE – relevant, informative, timely and entertaining.
Repurpose repurpose repurpose – we just can’t say this enough. All content created for the Wild About Whales campaign was never a one-off. It was constantly refreshed and repurposed for a range of channels. Create once and publish everywhere should be your mantra.
Plan AND be flexible – Work to include content which is planned in advance, or your ‘anchor’ content, as well as flexible – the content you can’t schedule in advance but that is still RITE for your audience – a sighting of Migaloo the white whale for example.
Utilise all of your channels – think beyond just your website and social media – how about a cool infographic, story pitch to media an article for your enewsletter or a case study video?
Don’t underestimate your audience – they have the power to share the content that you’ve created far and wide, and to help grow your audience to even more loyal followers. In national parks’ case we have grown and nurtured a large community of whale enthusiasts who love sharing their own content as well as ours.