Tam Al-Saad, Principal Consultant at Web Profits, the firm which ran Bellamy’s Organic’s content marketing strategy, elaborated on the key factors that led to success at the recent Naturally Good Business Summit 2019.
“Ad-blocking has grown significantly in the past few years, making it harder and harder to get eyeballs on any advertisements your firm may put out,” said Al-Saad.
“[This is why] content marketing is a good alternative, as it works to helps to break through the noise to directly connect with and build a relationship with the consumer.
“Before developing any strategy, it is important to identify your consumer segment, [so as to] provide them with what they want when they want it.”
He emphasized that content marketing was a ‘strategic process’, as was showcased by the approach utilized by Bellamy’s Organic, which succeeded in putting the firm on the map and rapidly expanding across the past few years not only nationwide but also in South East Asia and China.
For Bellamy’s, the target demographic was mothers, and the resulting five-step content strategy put in place focused exclusively on delivering content for this segment.
Suitable for all
The five major steps to the Bellamy’s content marketing strategy were: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy, which Al-Saad described as an approach that could work for ‘a range of different [companies and] industries across B2B and B2C’ .
“For the first step which was to create awareness, it was crucial to develop content that met consumer needs, and which got them [even] when not thinking about the products,” he said.
“Bellamy’s had already identified their target audience as health-conscious mothers, and as such we could craft content specifically targeting the needs of such pregnant women, [for example in the form of recipes or dietary advice for this group, showcased through articles or videos].”
Consideration in this case meant to build credibility and trust with the customer, which meant heightened engagement rates and an emphasis on good quality content.
“One of the key things we did was to promote an ebook, which we made sure to personalize not only with the receiver’s name, but also the date [she was] expecting.
“This was important, and contributed to [some] four-year long email sequences as we followed the journey of mother and child from childbirth through to toddlerhood, continuously sending relevant information at different stages of motherhood.”
Conversion was ‘the final push’ and call-to-action by the firm to customers, which Bellamy’s achieved via various strategies such as Facebook advertising, directly emailing product offers, and running campaigns to drive in-store sales.
“The key is to make the right offer at the right time – [based on the metrics we saw after pushing out the content across the first two stages], we now knew that the consumers were interested in [products and purchases], and acted accordingly,” added Al-Saad.
Finally, the Loyalty and Advocacy stages of the strategy focused on getting customers to promote the Bellamy’s Organic brand on their behalf.
“Mothers particularly trust other mothers, more than they trust brands. It was thus important for Bellamy’s to get their customers to do the promotions to other mothers, and we achieved this via approaches such as holding competitions encouraging them to share Bellamy’s products or photos on social media,” he said.
Influencers were also highlighted as an advantageous strategy to use during this stage, e.g. Bellamy’s hiring of two exceptionally adorable ‘baby-influencers’ to promote their product in Singapore.