If I asked what kinds of marketing in the digital world really work well and effectively, I believe many people would answer, “Content Marketing.”

Almost every brand in Thailand now needs to have at least one content channel of its own, whether a website, Facebook, IG, LINE, or Twitter. Some brands invest enormous budgets in this, from hundreds of thousands to millions of baht per month.

But in reality, truly successful content marketing is still quite rare. The results are often rather discouraging because it is hard to measure clearly how much business value is actually generated from the budget invested. Reach or likes may simply become a way to comfort ourselves that at least something came back from the investment.

To be honest, succeeding at content marketing is very difficult. Even having a large budget does not necessarily solve the problem, because we are living in an era of “content overload,” where there is content everywhere for people to consume.

There is content from friends on social networks, content from favorite celebrities, content from bloggers people follow, and all kinds of news content such as entertainment, politics, sports, and many different pages.

So for a brand to create outstanding content that rises above all that content, the opportunity seems very small.

Bangkok, Thailand – January 29, 2019 : woman using iPhone of show display app Social media screen. The phone is a daily necessity

The question is: how can we seize that small opportunity? Today, “Solbugtong” has some useful tips to share.

First, I would like you to change your way of thinking from creating content just to get a lot of views and likes to creating “content that is useful.” It is often said that if we want to change anything, the first thing we must change is our mindset. As long as we remain fixated on making content for high reach and lots of likes, it becomes difficult to create content that is genuinely good and useful.

Good content may receive many likes and shares, but content that gets many likes and shares is not necessarily good content.

If we stay attached to making content simply for reach and likes, we may end up posting dog or cat pictures, sexy women, or jokes that have nothing to do with our brand at all.

Useful content is content that gives some kind of value to viewers or readers while remaining within the scope of our brand or product. It might be content that provides knowledge about choosing our products, content that inspires readers, content that makes life easier, or content that allows readers to participate and be recognized within our community.

Second, closely following that, try to make content with a sense of humanity. Do not behave like a stiff brand speaking in advertising language or brand language to consumers. Speak to consumers the way people speak to one another. Try to find the right tone and voice for your brand—whether it is a playful young man, a knowledgeable guru who likes to share stories, a bold fashion girl, a persuasive talker, and so on.

Forget the idea that we are a B2C or B2B business that must sound formal. Instead, think of it as a human-to-human relationship. Customers do not want to talk to a lifeless brand; they want to talk to real people within the brand.

Finally, I would like to leave you with one more principle: creating content with the customer at the center.

In the digital world, it is strange but true that the more a brand talks about itself, the less people are interested. So instead of making content that talks only about ourselves, we should make content interesting by viewing it from the customer’s perspective.

To make it easy to see, imagine we are creating content for a butter brand’s page. Instead of making content to say how good our butter is, what it is made from, or how well it sells, we should look from the customer’s point of view. We already know that most customers buy our butter to bake. Therefore, rather than describing the butter’s properties, our content should focus more on recommending bakery recipes.

The principle of customer-centered content is simple: ask this question for every piece of content—“What will the reader or viewer gain from this content?”

To sum it up, the Solbugtong style of content has only three techniques: be useful, be human, and be customer-centered.

I hope these small techniques will give everyone’s content a chance to steal some attention away from the intense political news of this period.

Ahem… I told you already—it is difficult!