Getting Content Marketing Right: Priceless

Yesterday I attended a CMO breakfast meet up in Montreal – Rendez-vous CMO. Where my peers and I had the pleasure to hear from Raja Rajamannar (), Global Chief Marketing Officer at MasterCard share his experiences and insights about content marketing. Raja first started by contextualizing the power that we hold in our hands every day, our mobile phones. As he puts it, we have put rocket power in the hands of the consumer. But what does this mean for marketers? Well, it has changed the very nature of how marketers engage with consumers. Raja used the example of prime time television, and how with an always connected consumer it no longer exists. Instead media is consumed whenever and wherever people want. In an interconnected world, this poses a real opportunity for marketers to reach millions of people instantly especially through social media. But the problem is how do you engage and resonate with a new breed of connected consumers?

The MasterCard Way

This problem was approached by MasterCard in a unique way. It started with taking a long standing marketing initiative – the priceless campaign and repositioning it for a rocket powered enabled consumer. The new concept – connect people to priceless possibilities. Raja gave a few examples of how MasterCard put this into practice. Firstly, MasterCard customers now have access to special opportunities not available to the general public in cities around the world, such as tours of the Catacombs in Paris. Also MasterCard is surprising cardholders with priceless surprises such as having a beer and nachos with Justin Timberlake. The success of this campaign was overwhelming for MasterCard. With the highest levels of engagement they had ever had and stratospheric NPS scores that outperformed the competition.

The new priceless campaign by MasterCard demonstrates how content can do more than that just drive eyeballs, but help differentiate your brand from your competitors. MasterCard, though unique in their approach, is not alone in leveraging content marketing to differentiate their brand and grow awareness. Following Raja’s presentation, we heard from a roundtable of marketing executives at Gaz Métro, IBM and Sun Life Financial and how they are leveraging content marketing. They examined how content marketing is a conversation which starts with figuring out who you are talking to. Unfortunately, many companies adopting a content strategy too often forget the individual when creating content or when analyzing their content’s effectiveness.

Measuring the effectiveness of content

According to a Content Marketing Institute report 49 percent of companies surveyed said that measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing approach is easier said than done. At iPerceptions, we have found by pairing customer feedback with web analytics, digital marketers can determine the level of relevancy, uniqueness and alignment a piece of content creates. By tracking user engagement this provides a measure of the health of a content marketing strategy and provides marketers the ability to sustain and grow its audience.

Today just doing content marketing is not enough. To stand out from the crowd, you need to invest in content that deeply resonates with your audience. Only then can you turn content marketing into priceless opportunities to connect with your customers.