Content marketing is a new buzzword in the world of digital marketing. But what is it and how can the music industry use it to their advantage.

To find out more we’ve talked to Marcus Taylor, founder of Venture Harbour, a digital marketing agency that specialises in helping companies in the music, film, and game industries with digital and content marketing.

What is content marketing and why should the music industry care about it?

By definition, content marketing is broad and by no means innovative. I’d say that it’s the process of generating valuable content and publishing it (typically online) for the purpose of marketing your brand.

The reason that content marketing is emerging as a trend in digital marketing is largely due to the increasingly positive impact it has on increasing one’s web traffic and, ultimately, online revenue.

Content marketing (as a term) emerged out of the search industry around the end of last year. This was around the same time that Google launched a major Penguin update, which slammed the traffic of millions of websites for having an unnatural link profile. Because of Google’s preference for high quality content in ranking websites in search results, and the fact that creating high quality content is also important from a social media perspective, it’s becoming practically fundamental for online businesses to be generating high quality content to stay in the game.

In the music industry, there is such a huge divide between companies that ‘get it’ (digital marketing) and those who don’t. To be frank, the companies who don’t take digital marketing seriously now – and rely on old school marketing tactics will slowly die out as savvier competitors come in and disrupt the market. It sounds unlikely – almost implausible, but it’s really not. There is no bias for legacy when it comes to online, and that’s a really tough pill for many music companies to swallow.

What are your top tips when it comes to content marketing?

Work with experts. It may seem biased coming from me, but I cannot stress the importance of working with experts enough. Executing a successful content marketing campaign requires such a varied skillset – data visualisation, data narrative, journalist outreach, ideation, video production, as well as a knowledge of your industry and the psychological understanding of what provokes sharing and makes a piece of content spread virally etc. Having all of these covered by your in-house designer or marketing intern will not suffice if you want exceptional results.

On a production level, I advise creating content that’s emotionally provocative. It may seem relevant creating an infographic on ‘the history of music distribution’ if you’re a distributor, but will it really provoke mass sharing, build thousands of links, and cause a real uptick in your bottom line? Unlikely.

The most shareable and linkable pieces of content are those that provoke your audience emotionally. Think about what makes your audience’s blood boil. In the music industry, I’ve analysed a ton of data on what content gets shared the most, and repeatedly it’s the topics that make us all angry – overpaid executives, download piracy, streaming royalties, record & live industry duopolies etc.

Can you give us examples of content marketing being done well?

It’s important to bear in mind that the motivations for content marketing vary from campaign to campaign, so ‘done well’ can mean very different things to different companies. For example, when we created this infographic for Mobile Roadie, the purpose of the content was to generate coverage that would ultimately improve their search traffic, which it achieved effectively.

A contrasting example would be this blog post on ’30 Pieces of Advice From 30 Music Industry Entrepreneurs’. Since posting, it’s been shared over 750 times on social media channels and has got us coverage from SXSW, The Guardian, Econsultancy, and many others.

More importantly though, it’s driven more enquiries from potential clients than any conference we’ve attended or any other marketing activity we’ve done. Having worked out the time we put into creating that post and the work that came from it, our ROI from that individual blog post is well over 500% – and it continues to drive enquiries three months after posting!

How do you see this field developing?

On a strategic level, the biggest change we’re going to see is the quality of content produced will improve. It will no longer suffice to push out some cheap infographic – or write mediocre blog posts. To get exceptional results you’ll need to stand above the noise and create truly exceptional content. The brands that realise that sooner rather than later will be the winners.

On a technical level, I think the biggest change we’ll see in content marketing over the next year or so is a shift towards mobile and tablet optimised content. We’re currently at a point where roughly 20-25% of all website traffic comes from mobile or tablet devices. As this number continues to increase, it’ll become increasingly important for businesses and publishers to ensure that their content is well suited for mobile viewing.

Image via Oliver Carré-Delisle’s Flickr