If hustle was the key for traditional businesses to work, the hustle now has a new avatar. Earlier, it was pure hustle followed by the transaction. Today, it’s all about hustling with information. It’s more about informing, gaining trust, leveraging social media, amassing social proof, nurturing customers and then facilitating a sale.
For each of the steps in the modern buying cycle, content marketing plays a vital role. You probably know by now that content is at the heart of Internet marketing. Let’s see why companies should adopt a content marketing culture.
Culture Rules Behavior and Hence, Actions
What do Southwest Airlines, and Apple share in common? It’s culture. For each company, everything centers on culture. If Southwest Airlines is known for their legendary customer service and if Apple is known for designing some of the best lifestyle products in the world, it’s not so much about these companies making new products, innovating constantly and producing products and services that are world-class. There’s no mistake that these companies are the best in what they do; it’s just that they do it that way because they defined a culture to back up their businesses.
Culture, in a traditional sense, influences how people behave and hence act. It applies for businesses too. Content marketing needs a cultural backing because it envelops your business, involves everyone and it’s often the window of information exchange between the stake holders of your business and with your customers. Even small businesses such as WebpageFX, a Web design and development company, tries to breed culture as a part of growing up.
Culture Brings in Consistency
You’ll break rules, thwart the norm and almost always forget company policies. Culture, admittedly, is hard to break away from. You’ll occasionally slip and roll away but culture finds a way to bind production values, business ethics and core business philosophy. Further, culture brings in consistency.
People who belong to a particular culture almost always behave in a particular way. If you’ve applied that to business operations, product design and business processes, what do you get? The success of your content marketing depends on consistency and a content marketing culture helps you find that.
Culture Lends Voice
If a content marketing culture is a part of your business, everyone involved has a voice which finds its way into published content such as blogs, whitepapers, reports and books. This content will also make an impressionable mark on internal and external business communications.
Voice has character. Voice brings life. Voice is how your customers will come to recognize, value and relate with you. Businesses without a voice and hence, personality, character and values, aren’t businesses. They are more like short-term trading posts. Content marketing with a voice, which culture will find a way to define, gives your business some muscle. It lets you make a difference in style.
Have Culture; Will Differentiate
Your business creates products and services that are bound to solve a particular problem your potential customers have. Almost any business can do that. If so, how do you differentiate your business from competition? Customer service is one way. Your products and services are another way. The trouble with these differentiating points is that they are easy to replicate. Your competition can find a way to compete. They can’t, however, have the same culture as yours.
Just like every human is unique, every business with culture is special - one of a kind. Your competition can’t copy your culture; it can’t do things the way you do it. Culture now catapults your business to a unique stage of infallibility.
Culture is the Secret of Branding
Brands are created because promises are kept - consistently, repeatedly and unmistakably. Over periods of time, customers relate to brands; they come to trust these products. If you ever thought about how brands manage to achieve this level of consistency, the answer is culture again. Toyota cars don’t break down. McDonald’s Burgers almost always taste the same. Apple’s laptops don’t fail.
It’s possible to achieve this level of reputation only on the basis of working with a culture that clearly defines what each brand is supposed to achieve for businesses that depend on branding for profitability.
Provide a Unified Customer Experience
The better you serve your customers, the more they will buy from you. They will also spread the word about your business and they will come back more often to buy. To provide such customer experience is not easy though.
Culture gives your business a common ground to provide a unified customer experience. The logos, corporate branding kits and color schemes work to an extent. What customers finally take home is what they feel about your business. The ‘feeling’ comes from how you squeeze your business culture to provide a great experience for your customers.
Culture Demands Work
It takes a tremendous amount of work to run a business, to market your business, to provide customer service and to keep the wheels of business moving. How do so many moving parts come together? What’s that one thing that motivates employees, keeps business processes smooth and allows businesses to grow while keeping customers delighted? It’s hard work and it takes a lot more than task sheets and general management to make that happen. It takes years of ingrained culture.
Content marketing, like marketing itself, is not just the work of marketing department; it’s everyone’s work. Effective content marketing is everyone’s work. When all
stake holders wrap their heads around content marketing, it begins to show results. It creates an impact. Profits come from the reach of this impact.
Culture Gets You Firing on All Cylinders
Get together and work for a common cause and it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities of such collaboration. Business takes more than the need to make money, to provide employment and to trade. It requires a commitment to excel. You can have no half-hearted attempts in business. You can’t keep customers if they remain neutral about their feelings towards your products and services.
To get the equation right, you’ll need to fire up on all cylinders. You need gumption, zeal and a habit of excellence. Since your content marketing strategy also involves effort to get all this happening for you, culture gets you to the firing zone. It’s the spark that lights up the cylinders. It pushes the pistons.
How does your business culture influence the way you run your business? How deep does your content marketing culture and strategy go?
Content Photo via Shutterstock
Brian Marcus (pictured), Director of 