This Month in Content Marketing: August 2016

This is a monthly column about changes in the content marketing field. 

The 2016 Rio Olympics, and the back-to-school themes were pretty much prevalent in content marketing for this month. I’m not much into sports, but I’ll admit that I’ve watched several Olympic trending videos the past month.

Sending back the kids to school is also a major thing for moms like me. I usually browse through Pinterest and Facebook for school must-have ideas and I’m just one of the million other moms who lovingly prepare the kids for school.

So these two major content marketing themes have dominated our feeds the past month. Here are four recently published articles that will provide key takeaways and actionable marketing points for content marketers.

6 Ways the Olympics Won the Gold in Content Marketing

While Olympics committees have regulated the use of their Olympic trademarks in social media and content marketing, marketers can still takeaway bits and pieces of their communications strategy for the Olympics.

This article post by Ryan Buckley from Business2Community gave a rundown on what brands can learn from the Olympics communications strategy. They have successfully rolled out their communication messages through the effective use of different social media channels. These Olympics tactics include through strategic storytelling retweets, illustrating images, emojis, hashtags, blogs, and videos through the Olympics YouTube channel.

I strongly believe that events marketing is effective in grabbing the attention of a select group of audience who belong to a particular niche, and we all can learn from how the Olympics have managed to successfully connect with their target through several different tactics that brands can imitate as well.

Rising Above the Noise: How Brands Will Cut Through With Olympics Content

For an event as big as the Olympics, which has effectively strategized and regulated their communications, brands faced the challenge of rising above the Olympic messaging clutter. Lisa Lacy has detailed this in her article post on the Drum. Lisa has listed 3 thoughts that brands can capitalize on – whether they’re Olympic sponsors or not.

This article can draw inspiration for small brands competing on big brands. If you’re overpowered and have always been the underdog, you can learn a thing or two from this article. You can also check out this Olympic content marketing infographic from DigitalDoughnut for a more visual representation of other content marketing strategies that can help you bring home the gold.

How to Rock Your Back-to-School Sales and Marketing

Sabrina Fenster has laid out how important the back-to-school season is in the marketing industry. She stated in this article from Convince and Convert that this year, $828 billion of sales are expected during the back-to-school season. 

Interesting back-to-school insights are explained and visualized through the infographic creatively made for content marketers to understand how big this season is, and how they can take advantage of the theme, and ultimately get a portion of the projected back-to-school sales.

8 Back-to-School Social Media Strategies

This article from Adweek shows how current seasonalities or happenings can be leveraged for content marketing. Social media has been very big on taking advantage of this, so much so that there are 70 back-to-school subcategories in Pinterest while Twitter had 41.5 million back-to-school mentions in 2014.

8 social media strategies were listed for content marketers to know who to target (well obviously moms and kids!), and what the messaging should be, in order to capture the attention of this target segment.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Steve_Allen/DepositPhotos.com
In-post Photo #2: luminastock /DepositPhotos.com