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Exploring the Power of ‘Content Marketing’ and How to Do It without Advertising Expenses

There once was a time when mounting an advertisement on Facebook guaranteed crazy sales with a staggering Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). With the advent of the pandemic, people's screen time increased, resulting in the digital advertising market growing terrifyingly year on year.

Yet, these days the digital advertising market is being shaken. Significant factors being the established presence of iOS and Google's discontinuation of third-party cookies. In a nutshell, retargeting advertisements will no longer be an option.

Facebook's ad revenue showed a downward slope for the first time in 2022, and YouTube's quarterly revenue also recently showed a slight decline compared to the previous year.

For the first time, Facebook's previously impregnable ad revenue has dipped.

Companies Embracing Back to the Basic

This changing landscape highlights the necessity for companies to reconsider their marketing strategies. Traditionally, the importance of digital advertising and marketing was emphasized with the drastic growth of the digital advertising market. Now, their significance is dwindling. Companies, having realized that there are no longer assured "once in a lifetime" opportunities, are shifting their focus back on branding and content marketing.

A significant increase in awareness of the need for content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing refers to creating and sharing content in a variety of formats that are useful or intriguing to our customers via blogs or social media channels. The ultimate goal is to attract new customer leads, turn them into fans, and prompt them to develop an interest in our products and services.

Content marketing is gaining renewed importance as the efficiency of paid marketing decreases. Why? Because once you've secured a customer pool, the content simply keeps coming.

In the past, content marketing was largely highlighted for strengthening company branding. However, a recent survey of chief marketing officers at major U.S. companies reveals that they are now utilizing content marketing to secure actual leads. It's reported that content marketing has yielded over three times the results at 60% of the cost compared to traditional advertising methods.

So, What Can We Do?

What activities should we exactly engage in, then?

The most basic approach is to operate a text-based media outlet, such as a blog. This leaves us with two options. We could operate a blog on our own website (for instance, https://VideoStew.com/blog) or create a Naver blog.

Although Naver now displays search results from external blogs, its preference for Naver blogs remains high. Hence, if your business is based in South Korea, you might want to consider setting up a Naver blog.

Nonetheless, the harsh reality is, due to the multitude of power bloggers and viral marketing companies, it's difficult to get high-ranking exposure, despite employing well-executed search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

When searching ‘video-making,’ a keyword related to VideoStew, the majority of content ranking high is from power bloggers.

A recommended alternative is video marketing. Specifically, attempting high-ranking exposure by using short-form videos, otherwise known as "Shorts" marketing.

The good news is, the VideoStew team is actively attempting SEO on video platforms. While the VideoStew channel is still a small channel with under a thousand subscribers, when we search ‘video-making’ on YouTube, we are ranked first in the Shorts section. If you're curious about the VideoStew team's SEO journey, please refer to this article.

VideoStew channel is ranked first in the YouTube ‘video-making’ Shorts section.

Why Opt for Video Content Marketing?

If you're a company looking to kick off content marketing, why should you concentrate on video channels like YouTube over text-based blogs? Let's summarize the reasons as follows:

1) Higher likelihood of high-ranking exposure compared to Naver blogs

As aforementioned, Naver blogs are in a state of saturation. Marauded by viral companies that have deciphered the algorithm(?), it's supremely challenging to get top-notch exposure unless you've engaged in viral marketing paying royalties to power bloggers who have already monopolized the market.

In comparison, YouTube is still an unchartered territory, primarily due to the initial hurdle of video production itself.

By utilizing solutions such as VidIQ that aid in YouTube SEO, we can immediately verify the difficulty of high-ranking exposure for a certain keyword by comparing the search results based on Naver and YouTube standards.

Also, because Naver diversifies sections by keywords and power advertisements frequently occupy the "above-the-fold" area (the first screen that appears before scrolling), there's a multitude of uncontrollable variables.

2) YouTube capably performs the role of a search engine

According to OpenSurvey's annual ‘Social Media · Search Portal Trend Report,’ the proportion of users utilizing YouTube for information search is increasing year by year. In 2022, it has reached a level equivalent to that of Naver.

The ranking of service platforms utilized by users for information search.

In addition, according to YouTube's Consumer Insight published by YouTube, 90% of users discover new brands or products via YouTube. That shows video platforms play a role beyond providing simple fun.

3) Small work effort but high impact

Of course, Instagram Reels and TikTok haven't quite evolved into a search engine yet. However, short-form platforms are always in competition to secure new contributors. One point of appeal is the possibility of my content being exposed and leading to subscriptions, regardless of the number of subscribers.

Therefore, if the content can provide fun/information/emotion to our potential customers, it can easily be exposed and there's a high likelihood of it leading to subscriptions.

Short-form videos have a maximum length of one minute. If you convert the script length, it amounts to about 450 characters. These days, even one minute is considered too long, so the trend is to make a video within 30 or 40 seconds. Accordingly, this requires writing about 300 characters of text, significantly reducing the load. It's an efficient way to plan content.

Realistically, this is the biggest advantage. It carries a much lower risk than spending time researching and planning, without knowing when the search engine will catch and expose it.

So, the VideoStew team always stresses on ‘video first.’ We first conduct a simple survey to create a 30-40 second video, and then craft blog posts or newsletter articles based on further research. Just like this content.

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uL-CSa2JT5E" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

First created was a Shorts video from a 'video first' perspective…

After Content Planning, What’s Next?

In the past, video production itself was quite a challenging task. You had to learn professional tools like Premiere Pro and undergo a learning curve until you achieved sufficient quality.

However, with the use of AI video production tools like VideoStew, there’s no need for us to turn into video production experts ourselves. You just have to plan your content as usual, and finish it off like creating a PowerPoint slide for it to turn into a glamorous video.

Especially if you are already running a blog, you can easily turn it into a video by inserting the blog URL and clicking once.

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bxeMgkWtKkQ" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

Automatically summarizing a lengthy article and creating a video in one go…

If you’ve been seeking a continuous method to interact with your customers and reach new potential customers without worrying about advertising costs, it's time to focus on content marketing with VideoStew!