Cooking Up Content Marketing

Traditional Media and Marketing

Advertising on TV and the radio between programs used to be the go-to method for getting eyes and ears on your ad. Companies would have to reach out to a local broadcaster and go back and forth with a sales rep to negotiate a price (often times thousands of dollars!) to purchase maybe a minute of air time for their commercial. This way of advertising is extremely expensive and has a pretty low return on investment (ROI) when compared to more modern online marketing strategies. Buying air time will get your ad seen by a large amount of people but in reality of that large number only a small group is actually your target demographic. Let’s say you’ve paid to air an ad and it gets seen by 100,000 people but of that 100,000 only 10,000 are actually going to fall into your target demographic of relevant potential customers. To get your ad seen by that very important 10,000 people you still had to pay for it to be shown to 100,000 people!

Ronald McDonald House Charities and Dillards partner every holiday season to sell a cookbook. RMHC Richmond makes a recipe from the cookbook to promote sales which benefit the House in Richmond.

Creating Content

Content Marketing at it’s core is creating online materials that don’t directly promote your business or organization but create interest in it. In order to achieve this the content being created needs to add some value to the consumer in order to make them want to invest their time in the organization and follow your social media accounts. The video above is an example of content marketing I produced for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Richmond and Dillard’s. The two organizations partner with each other to sell cookbooks that benefit Ronald McDonald Houses across the country. Instead of directly marketing the cookbook we decided to make a recipe from the book. The value provided was an entertaining cooking video of an easy holiday recipe but it also indirectly makes the viewer aware of the cookbook.