What is ‘content’?
If you have read anything about marketing over the past 10 years, you will have come across the term ‘content’. You have created all these ‘channels’ to talk to your customers and potential customers, but what exactly do you talk to them about? They will only listen so long to you pushing your product on them before losing interest, so to keep people engaged you need to have interesting stuff to say. This interesting stuff is your ‘content’.
There has been a huge move in marketing from ‘push’ marketing (where you would try to push your message to someone though adverts, sending them a brochure and generally trying to pop up in their face when they least expect it) to ‘pull’ marketing, which is where you create something of interest that means people come seek you out. Instead of paying for advertising, you might create a blog putting out information that is of interest to the type of people who would buy your product. You might set up a YouTube channel sharing videos to educate your vegan customers about something related to what you sell, that in turn drives traffic to your website. Your email newsletter might carry a regular update from the animal charity that your business donates 10% of its earnings to. You might create a worksheet or a download that you can share with all your customers to help them create their food plan for the week, or you might even go all out and write a book that relates to your industry. All this is ‘content’. This is the good stuff that you share on your social media pages, put in your monthly emails and include in your videos, and it has replaced traditional advertising in many instances.
Think about the vegan brands that you interact with, the ones you really care about or support. A lot of that interaction is intended to develop a relationship ‘away from the product’. Placing a product in your basket in the supermarket or ordering your latest order from someone’s website may be a routine task that you do without a lot of thought. However, what keeps you putting their product in your basket, rather than trying someone else’s, is the relationship the company has built with you. It might be that you first found out about the company by seeing their ‘content’, such as a social media post that someone shared in your local vegan Facebook group.
Many successful companies operate without doing any traditional advertising. Take The Happy Pear. If you are outside of Ireland then you will not have seen The Happy Pear range of products in your local mini-market, or have eaten at one of their Cafes (from their original site in Greystones on the east coast, through to their all-vegan cafe in Terminal 1 of Dublin Airport). If you ARE outside of Ireland and know The Happy Pear brand, and the infectious energy of their founding twins Dave and Steve, it will most likely be from their vegan cooking videos on YouTube, their online cookery courses, or their range of recipe books. Once you do find them, and follow them, you’ll get caught-up in their constant stream of social media activity. The Instagram stories from Dave and Steve sharing their daily, crack-of-dawn bracing swim in the Irish sea or trying out new recipe ideas with their family and friends. Or their YouTube channel that mixes behind the scenes, and sometimes very personal, stories from the founders and their staff alongside their latest cookery demonstrations.
The Happy Pear is a company built on high-quality content. They don’t pay for TV ads – they don’t need to. They know exactly what their target audience will interact with (your eye should be wandering back to your customer profiles sheets here) and give their million-strong community all-areas access to the company. This is something that is unique to vegan businesses. Our customers don’t just love our products, they love our mission. They want to know that we are real people and feel involved in our journey.
Can you imagine the CEO of Pepsi sharing their morning routine on Pepsi-Cola’s Instagram story every day? Can you imagine Clarks Shoes recording a video of how tired their staff are at the end of a long day in one of their stores? Can you imagine someone from the head office of Sainsbury’s supermarket recording a mobile phone video showing what they just made for Sunday lunch and uploading it to Sainsbury’s official YouTube account? Of course not, and to be honest we wouldn’t be interested; it would alienate the customers who didn’t share that individual’s life-view. With a vegan company however, you already know that many of your customers share your core views, and so the content you create can (and should) bring these people closer to you, your brand and your mission.
You will not be able to match the sheer volume of content that a company like The Happy Pear puts out. The founders Dave and Steve are the definition of hard-workers, but since opening their original fruit and veg shop in 2014 they now employ over 100 people across their operation. And that’s a lot of people to help out with making videos, writing blogs, and planning social media schedules. But that doesn’t mean you should not follow companies like this and observe the content they create. Spend time studying them. How much closer do you feel to the company and the people within it? How much are you engaging with their mission? And how does that not just build loyalty in their brand, but prompts you to try more of their products? Watching The Happy Pear’s YouTube cooking videos drives people to sign up to their online cookery courses (and I know, because that’s how I ended up buying Lisa one of their online courses as a birthday present, and let me tell you it was the best thing to happen to our kitchen!). Following the company’s daily stories on Instagram drives you to pre-order their new book (and I know, because by the time their last book launched we felt as if we’d been part of the writing team because of all the behind-the-scenes posts and stories we’d seen on their Instagram account!). Being so engaged with their content can even make you book a trip to Dublin to visit one of their cafes and drop into a local SuperValu mini-mart to pick up some of their Falafel Burgers.
What The Happy Pear are also doing is building an audience of ready customers for the future. At the time of writing, you can only buy The Happy Pear (whether that’s their products or visiting their restaurants) in Ireland. However, through the content they produce, they are reaching a much wider audience. So, if the time comes when they want to bring their products to the UK or the rest of Europe, they already have an eager and waiting audience to build on.
