Martha Stewart helps us with everything from organizing our closets to making the perfect grilled cheese sandwich. She tackles event planning with stride and menu planning with ease, while continuously dishing out more and more content into our eager hands. With fans and followers in the millions on the top social networks, her reach illustrates the popularity of her content.
I think we can all agree Martha Stewart is, indubitably, the Queen of Content Marketing.
I often look to Martha’s website and social channels for content inspiration. The Martha Stewart brand is a perfect muse for ideas on how to churn out content that is relevant, timely and useful.
If you search her site for Halloween, you will find a lot more than decorating tips and recipes. The site features detailed instructions for pumpkin carving, instructional guides for crafting home-made costumes, and even printable templates for paper crafts, among many others.
While we can’t all be a content machine like Martha, we can learn a thing or two from her to inject into our marketing strategy. Here are five ways to inspire your content strategy:
1. Versatility in Engagement
The Martha Stewart brand takes advantage of multiple mediums to reach its individual buyer personas with a wide variety of content. From video tutorials on YouTube to creative photography on Instagram, the brand is creating content optimized by medium and social channels, which helps to make the content sharable and memorable. Who doesn’t like cute puppy photos? In this example, in addition to sharing user content, a simple hashtag promotes the Martha Stewart Pets product line without coming across as an advertisement.
2. Subtle Calls-to-Action
If you’re going for the elusive thought-leadership role, think “give, give and give some more.” Martha makes sure she peppers plenty of CTAs throughout her site and also within content—but subtly. She makes sure the product use / lifestyle image is in the forefront of her content, with buying options following when applicable. The method to her madness demonstrates giving before receiving. In a one-page newsfeed of blogs including projects, recipes and tutorials, there is only one Shop This call to action, among many Read More, Learn How and Watch Video calls to action.
3. Brand Personality
Martha injects herself into everything she publishes. She not only gives instructions for her costumes, she models a few herself each year. Her YouTube channel boasts hundreds of videos with more than 86,000 subscribers and 18 million views. In fact, she is currently featuring a six-part video mini-series on this year’s contest, in which she selects one young designer’s idea for her 2014 Costume.
4. Revamped Content
Try creating a new post or article with a new twist on something old, incorporating a new trend, designing around various color palettes and seasonal or holiday themes, or a new way of solving an old problem. Last year the trend was vampire pumpkins, this year—zombies. New trend, new post.
5. Multi-Faceted Context
Try maximizing quality and quantity by creating an individual article or post for each variation of a project or steps to a solution. Don’t throw all of your pumpkins into one basket. Spreading them around in a variety of formats makes it easy for your audience to find your content based on exactly what they are searching for. For instance, in this example each type of pumpkin carving project might have an article, a video, a photo and a template.
Takeaway
Don’t be afraid to research and follow what the big B2C brands are doing with content marketing. While you might be selling B2B in an industry that doesn’t involve “crafting,” you can still find inspiration and new ways to feature your content through brands like Martha Stewart.
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