At the final You Are The Media Lunch, Bournemouth, hosted by Mark Masters - who btw is the big content advocate, prophet, evangelist and author of The Content Revolution (review to come) - his guest was the Digital Marketing director of The Met Office.
While I've been ignorant all these years, turns out that The Met office really does have a lot of competition including The Weather Channel, BBC and Google - I just assumed The Met provided all the content - but oh no!
So, how does The Met manage to stand out and do things differently?
Well if you're not yet familiar with the Blue Ocean Strategy- which I will be approaching more in the coming posts (I have a review of that book to come too) - it's all about finding the uncontested spaces. I'm a true advocate of this - find where there is no competition and place your stake in the ground and claim ownership. And when I say own it - really own it.
And this is exactly what The Met Office has done; it identified it's untapped space and began developing the most relevant content to feed a growing legion of fans. So how did The Met do this?
Well simple - it used its existing internal knowledge, industry authenticity and credibility and trust to provide content to educate people on what exactly is - wait for it - what exactly is weather! Might seem such an obvious idea, but while everyone was selling The Met was educating.
How did they do this?
Simple - they looked at their own data and found out what customers were trying to find out. They LISTENED...yes...market research really can be that simple.
Ask your customers what and why and listen to what they have to say. The quickest way to lost customers is to give them exactly what they don't want.
The Met office gave away content to educated and inform to build a loyal and engaged audience and from this they were able to redevelop its product to focus on these needs from where the company was able to commercialise this success.
By building an authoritative and trusted tone through advice and insight building a thorough and considered content and outreach calendar utilising internal knowledge and expertise for credibility (including partners and customers), the digital marketing team now had a marketing strategy that was aligned across all channels and shared throughout the business for a unified approach.
This collaborative working approach, not only allowed individuals in the business to share what they did in their role, but also helped to upskill internal teams for content and digital communications that then created a unique business community.
What does this mean?
In my experience, involving all departments in the marketing content strategy not only allows for the business to be engaged with what the business is communicating externally - but allows the use of existing resources of intelligence, expertise, as well as activities that can give a huge pipeline of content.
By sticking to the theme, you provide credibility, consistency and authenticity where this content can be used across all channels allowing you to champion your business, your people and your industry.
You Are The Media Lunch has certainly helped me understand what I have been doing all these years - and share that with like-minded marketing content enthusiasts.