Content Marketing in the Entertainment Industry

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The entertainment category has countless niches, from theaters and comedy clubs to entertainment brands. Blogs, magazines, live streaming services, and so much more all make up the industry. No matter where your brand falls in this industry, one thing is for sure: Competition is growing. The increase in competition means you need to position your brand for sustainable growth.

When it comes to growing your business, content marketing stands out as one of your best options. When done right, a content strategy can position your entertainment brand as an innovative industry leader. Plus, content marketing can help you attract and engage prospects while building loyalty amongst your existing customers. Here's what you should know.


What is Content Marketing?

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In short, content marketing is a concept focused on offering value to people with the goal of building awareness for the brand behind it. Content marketing comes in many forms and consists of both online and offline advertising. Modern content marketing often focuses on digital mediums, like social media platforms and your website.

Content marketing is a concept that will inform your content creation and marketing for years to come. Implementing it requires a great deal of research and planning. As you'll see later, this research will form the foundation of all of your content writing and digital marketing going forward.

So, let's explore how content marketing can play a role in your entertainment brand's growth and success.


Benefits of Content Marketing for Your Entertainment Brand

Benefits-entertainment

Content marketing aims to offer value to your audience, but how exactly does that benefit your entertainment brand? Here's a look at the benefits associated with content marketing.


Strong1
Build Brand Awareness

As people begin to receive valuable, insightful, and engaging content from your brand, they'll start to share it with their friends and family. Over time, your brand will become associated with that unique content. You may even become an authority in your niche as people consistently turn to you (and point people to you) for the content you offer.

As you build up awareness for your brand, your offerings will also begin to receive more recognition. Through case studies, blog posts, and other content, you can build trust and authority for your company while driving traffic to your website.

Customer
Gain Consumer Trust

Familiarity builds trust, which is why building awareness for your brand is crucial. As people learn more about who your company is and what you can offer them, you'll naturally start building consumer trust. This leads to more prospects and customers down the road.

While it's not an overnight result of any marketing campaign, building consumer trust over time can do wonders for your business' growth.


Organic
Drive Organic Traffic

Content marketing both directly and indirectly helps to increase organic traffic to your website. The most direct way in which it does this is by offering valuable content. Naturally, your content is going to center around long-tail keywords and contain information that makes search engines rank it highly. Of course, while targeting keywords with high search volume can generate traffic, rankings take time to cement.

There are also indirect ways that content marketing drives organic traffic. Your content will also spread general awareness for your brand. A combination of on-page SEO and other SEO strategies, and tools like Google Analytics, will increase organic traffic.


Nature
Nurture Prospects Automatically

When done right, content marketing can take a load off the shoulders of your customer service and sales specialists. That's because great content will help nurture people through the sales funnel, leading to more conversions. So, your content strategy should include content that targets all of your personas and offers them what they want to see in every stage of the funnel.

Additionally, when you create content around search terms and features, customers will get answers without ever having to consume the time of your support staff. This saves your team time and cuts back on expensive resources. Meanwhile, with basic questions answered, your staff can focus their energy on qualified leads and active customers.


Tips for Creating a Winning Entertainment Content Strategy

Tips-entertainment

You've seen content marketing at work in the industry. Now, let's dive into the step-by-step process of creating a content strategy for your brand.


Steps
Step 1: Do Your Research

Before you can start jotting down ideas or typing up an article, you need to spend some time doing your research. While it may not seem like the most exciting thing, the research you do now will inform everything you do in the steps to come. Make sure you put in the time and effort so you can proceed with confidence. Take your time, because this is laying the foundation for your content strategy, and you'll rely on this information to meet your goals.

If you haven't already, now is the time to conduct in-depth research regarding your brand and its audience. You should be able to answer the following questions without hesitation. The answers should be based on demographics and statistics — not guesses or hopes.

  • Who is your ideal customer? Where can you find them? How do they like to consume content?
  • Who is your brand and how do you want to interact with customers? Why do they resonate with your company?
  • What do you offer? How does it solve your customers' pain points? What do your customers care about the most?

Write down your answers to these questions and prepare two resources for yourself: A customer persona and a brand book. You may come up with two or three customer personas in all, but it's important that each one is thoroughly researched. Your brand book might mention the traits of these customer personas, but it should focus on who your company is and how it should represent itself.

Your brand book and customer personas will be resources your company continues referencing as you move forward. These two documents will inform many decisions you make as a company.


Steps
Step 2: Set Goals and Metrics

What's a plan if you don't know where you want it to take you to? As a business, it's essential that you take at least a few minutes to define some clear, actionable goals. You also need to choose the right metrics to track your progress toward your goals. Most businesses set "driving more website traffic" as their overall goal for content marketing. That's great, but you need to get more specific.

  • Goals should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART).
  • You should set both short-term and long-term goals that support one another.
  • You need to define metrics to track your progress along the way.

You should aim to establish three short-term goals and one or two long-term goals that you can work toward. Your short-term goals need to coincide with and support your long-term goals. For instance, if your long-term goal is to increase your website traffic by 25%, your short-term goals may include doubling your social media followers and increasing engagement by 20%. Both of those things will help you drive more people to your website.

As you go about setting your goals, remember to make them achievable. It's okay to be optimistic, but if you set goals that are simply impossible to complete within the amount of time you give yourself, you're only going to get discouraged. Set lots of small goals that you'll meet along the way to a larger goal to stay motivated and enable you to track your progress.


Steps
Step 3: Create Your Content Calendar

Now that you've done your research, you've laid the groundwork for the next step of your content strategy. In this step, you'll create your content schedule or "content calendar." A content calendar is exactly what it sounds: it's a January through December calendar that has slots for every piece of content you want to publish.

In order to create your content calendar, you need to know three things:

  • Where are you going to publish? (Ex. Facebook, Twitter, your website, etc.)
  • What are you going to publish? (Ex. Video, blog post, podcast, etc.)
  • When are you going to publish? (Ex. once a week on your blog, etc.)

Your content calendar will specify what type of content you're publishing to where and how frequently you'll be doing it.

One fundamental component of effective content marketing is consistency. It's important that you come up with a schedule that you can routinely and sustainably execute.

When it comes to choosing which platforms you're going to publish on and how often, you need to think back to the customer research you conducted earlier. With it, you'll be able to decide what platforms your audience favors, what type of content they most enjoy consuming, and when/how often they're online. Your content production capacity will also affect the type and amount of content you create.

If you're stuck between publishing an article twice a week to match your competitors or once a week to fit your budget, go with the latter. Remember that it's quality over quantity. Content marketing is about offering value. So, you need to create a content calendar that empowers you to do that rather than a schedule that stretches you too thin.


Steps
Step 4: Finalize Your Content Plan

You've got your content calendar laid out. Now you have a year's worth of empty slots waiting for an idea. That can be very intimidating to any business, so breathe a sigh of relief because you don't need to plan a whole year's worth of topics all at once. Most businesses do just fine staying 1-3 months ahead of their topics. If you focus on the latest trends or news, you may even need a shorter period of planning.

Whatever the case may be, when it comes to filling in your content calendar with ideas, your research will do a lot of the legwork for you. Keyword research should inform your content strategy because, after all, it will reveal what your audience is searching for and what they care about.

Building your content plan around keywords will also aid your SEO efforts because Google and other search engines want to see you targeting all of those semantically-related keywords. It shows them what your site is about and that you offer a variety of valuable content. Of course, not all of your content can be driven by keywords.

As a brand, you should create a healthy mix of content. In addition to keyword-based content, you should create content that builds your brand up. Here are some examples:

  • Take your audience behind-the-scenes to show the inner workings of your company.
  • Introduce your audience to your team members and the faces behind the brand.
  • Dig into your company's history and back story.
  • Showcase your company's values and good deeds, especially in the local community.

These are just a few ideas to help you round-out your content strategy and reap all of the benefits associated with content marketing. For now, focus on sprinkling in some ideas from every category. Testing out new formats and series is a great way to see what works and what doesn't. That trial-and-error will eventually help your brand find the perfect balance.


Successful Engineering Brands (and how they did it!)

Entertainment-example

Looking for inspiration on how content marketing has worked in the entertainment industry for other brands? Here are two examples of entertainment brands that have an effective content strategy in place.


Twitch is the single most popular live streaming service in the industry. This digital startup provides a platform for creators and gamers to stream their content live. Twitch also allows creators to build a community around what they love doing and get monetary support in the process.

While competitors have popped up, Twitch continues to succeed thanks to mass adoption. On the Twitch blog, the company discusses new features that add to the usability of the platform for both creators and subscribers (like the new direct debit feature). They also cover the latest trends, up-and-coming creators, and more. Twitch creates a nice balance of evergreen content and news-related content with posts about Black History Month and other events.

One of the best things Twitch does is routinely incorporate the opinions of the platform's biggest streamers, helping to engage the community and put the spotlight on their users. This builds Twitch's reputation even more while cultivating a larger reader base. People come to the Twitch blog to see what their favorite creators are up to and see what's new with the platform.


While the tourism industry has been hit with challenges, MGM Resorts continues to offer excellent examples of effective content marketing. Even though bookings may have slowed down, this brand hasn't.

The brand is known for its impressive resort properties, astounding entertainment acts, and casinos. They have locations in more than 30 places around the world.

Much of the brand's website is dedicated to explaining their properties and amenities, with booking tools for the same. MGM Resorts also maintains static guides about entertainment acts, weddings, and events. These guides answer the questions potential guests and event planners have. They also serve to market the resort properties, showing off their best uses and all the reasons to visit.

The resort also publishes M life Magazine, which features entertainment acts, recipes, celebrity interviews, and more. MGM Resorts uses its global status to attract guests from around the world. By offering content on celebrities, vacations, and weddings, MGM continues to build its reputation of being lavish, luxurious, and exclusive. This is a brand with a strong identity, and its content reinforces it in every form.


Looking for Premium Entertainment Writers?

Here at Scripted, we help entertainment brands like yours every day create content that helps them stand out from competitors, gain better rankings, and offer real value to their audience. We'll work to understand your brand and its needs while our top-quality entertainment writers put your plan into action. You can choose our Cruise Control service to have everything managed for you or, if you prefer, opt for a self-service tier and execute your content marketing strategy at your own pace.

Whatever your business chooses to do, Scripted will give you confidence in your content. Interested in learning more about how Scripted can help your company grow and thrive? Explore our database of entertainment writers.

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