Content Marketing Today

8 Vital Lessons to Learn from This Expensive Marketing Misstep!

Big bucks squandered to insert content free DVD in magazine

You can be sure that an advertising sales rep did a great job convincing the Harding Poorman Group to insert a DVD in the October 2008 issue of Book Business.

While conceding that they do show off their packaging technology, they blew the opportunity to demonstrate to their prospects the kind of rich content that DVD could and should contain.  In other words, it all boils down to a missed content marketing opportunity.  Prospects are likely to say, “I loved your packaging, but you don’t show me why I should invest big bucks to put a DVD in a magazine.”

When I ripped open the package and popped the DVD into my laptop, I expected some pretty cool stuff based on the ‘ innovative packaging’ that surrounded it.  Imagine my disappointment to find that the only content was the single page shown below:

They wound up with this awful content because they failed to ask the most important question of all when it comes to content marketing: How can we use this expensive marketing opportunity to teach our customers how to succeed with our help, thereby proving how powerful DVD marketing could be ?

Their packaging is great. But, should you invest in their innovative packaging to insert a DVD into a magazine, definitely avoid their content marketing don’ts.

8 DVD Content Marketing Don’ts!

• Don’t use a powerful medium such as a DVD without demonstrating why your customers would want to invest the money in your packaging–and on the cost of inserting it into a magazine.
• Don’t show a single page that is absolutely static except for some tiny rotating graphics that barely suggest what your company does.
• Don’t use a headline “Strength in Numbers” that has absolutely no meaning or implied benefit for your customers.
• Don’t use brief company centric copy that provides absolutely no clue about the benefits you can provide: “Introducing the Harding Poorman Group.  We’re still the same great group of companies, owned by the same Indiana-based entrepreneurs, combining forces to help better serve you.” So what!
• Don’t bury the primary product offering you are spending big bucks to promote at the bottom of the single DVD page in dreary gray letters.
• Don’t supply a DVD that is devoid of content other than the single deadly page with hyperlinks to company websites–some of which are broken links.
• Don’t provide an empty DVD that could have contained more than a gigabyte of high quality, high resolution examples of your best customer work. 
• Don’t make your customers work hard to track down information on the broad range of services that go way beyond your packaging and include printing, signage, marketing, mailing, and fulfillment.

Summing up: Remember that your job is to help your customers succeed.  If your DVD content marketing efforts can’t make a powerful case for the ways that you can help, do something much less expensive and more effective.

To update a famous old adage: “You can’t always tell a DVD by its cover.”