Content Marketing
Last week in my Entrepreneurial Marketing class, we covered content marketing. I thought that would be an excellent topic for my final intern notebook entry since social media and content marketing have played a considerable role in my internship with DSG. Also, it provides an interesting side by side comparison between the classroom and the office. The lecture started with a quote that said, “Market with a magnet, not a sledgehammer.” I’ve never heard that before but it stuck out to me and it’s something I could hear our VP of Marketing, Michael Schnall, say in a branding meeting.
Outbound and Inbound
We mainly discussed two different types of content marketing, outbound and inbound. Our professor gave a handful of examples for both sides but I’m only going to focus on one form of outbound and one form of inbound.
One of the examples he gave for outbound was sending out newsletters to an email list. Just this past winter, I had experienced what goes into designing the right newsletter template and how decisions get made about newsletter content . Working alongside Paige and Michael during that process and gaining valuable insight made this part of the lecture more relatablee.
On the other hand, one of the examples he used for inbound marketing was blogs. He talked more in a sense about blog sites but still went into detail about what makes a good quality blog. The professor talked about how blog posts should be relevant and optimized for the target audience. I’ve heard Michael say this a lot when I was searching for articles or blogs to post on our LinkedIn. Just because the article touches on something DSG offers, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right fit for our desired audience. Having experience writing these intern blogs and reading the blogs Michael has written over the past year, really helped paint a picture of what the professor was trying to convey during his lecture.
Full Circle
At the end of the lecture, the professor had our class break into groups to complete a task. The task was to look at a business related to the one we were working on, preferably a direct competitor, and analyze the content they are posting.
We looked at what was working, what was not, and how that would affect our strategy. I’ve performed similar tasks while interning at DSG. On one of my first days, Paige asked me to look at other agencies and see what they were posting on social media. Paige wanted to know what I thought looked good and what I thought we could adapt.
Paige concluded that she wanted more daily posts about success stories, case studies, and team happenings. She also wanted each post to have similar colors, font and graphics so that readers could easily identify our brand. DSG still uses many of these practices today when posting on Instagram and other social media platforms. It was fascinating to see these lessons come full circle.