Content Marketing V.S. Toolkit Marketing

In general content marketing is a good way to attract potential customers and at the same time retain old customers through continuous engagement. However, content marketing may not have the same effect across all businesses. Content marketing works better for some businesses and not so well for some.

Depending on the type of business that you are in your content marketing can produce different results. Every business should have a content marketing strategy. However, the amount of resources that you put into content marketing should vary. For some businesses I recommend putting your focus into what I call toolkit marketing. Toolkit marketing is basically to create functional and useful tools for your customers to use. To help make their life easier.

Over the years of my marketing career I have found that in general contents that are fun and content that are time dependent works best. Working best means attracting more views and interaction from your customers.

In general I found two types of contents that works best. 1. content that are fun and 2. content related to time dependent news

Take a well-known company as an example. Lets look at Facebook, how many times a day do you go onto Facebook to check out your friends and your following fan pages' update? 5 times, 15 times, 20 times? Are you interested in what your friends are up to? Are they posting their pictures from vacation? Are they posting the pictures from the last party that you guys went to together? Are they posting funny videos of their new born? Are they sharing how they are feeling at work today? You not only browse these contents, most of us like to share our thoughts after going through the content by pressing the LIKE button or by commenting below the post or by posting a expression figure. Why do you do that? Simple! because it is fun.

Take media companies like Bloomberg, CNN, Google News, Yahoo News...as example. Why do you keep going back to them at a high repetitively rate? You want to know what's going on in your country? You want to know what's going on in the world? If you are an investor you might want to know how the market is doing, you might want to know how your stocks are performing and the factors that are or likely to affect your investment portfolio. You might want to know the weather information to decide on what to wear each day...These are news content and are time dependent. Time dependent is a very strong factor that keeps you going back to it.

If your company does not produce contents that fall into the above two categories, then I recommend you to give Toolkit marketing a try.

When I was working as an insurance broker, I would publish content related to products, such as insurance product comparison, highlighting recommended products, how to choose and spot a good product. To publish contents related to the importance of risk management, the importance of retirement planning...etc. These contents have attracted customers and have received a decent amount of newsletter signup on my website. However, it was nothing explosive. Why? because these contents are not fun, its boring! When it is the last time that you eagerly seek for information regarding an insurance product? When was a time that an article on risk management gets you excited?

It was not until I released a web-based tool for insurance brokers and buyers to calculate people's insurance age. Basically, your insurance age is your actual age plus 1 when its six months after your last birth date. Another tool that I released enable buyers to input and store the information regarding their purchased insurance. Basically, to help people keep track of the insurance that they have purchased. There are two things that you can never find. The other leg of your socks , and your purchased insurance plan.

With this toolkit marketing my website traffic increased by 140%. The amount of site interaction time increased by 20%. The click through rate of the toolkit related campaign on Facebook outperformed most of my content driven campaigns.

Now I am working at a printing press manufacturing company encountering the same issues as my insurance business. I have tried contents related to technical articles, case studies, company news, industry trends, management ideas...At the end of the day, I haven't found a content formula for an explosive growth. Therefore, moving onto toolkit marketing.