Learning from Deliveroo’s Belfast Content Marketing

It doesn’t happen as often as it should but, every now and then, I’ll scroll through my Facebook newsfeed and stumble across some social media marketing that actually makes me stop, read, listen or watch…

Happily, that happened recently when I was targeted with a Deliveroo Facebook ad.

The fast-food delivery tech giant (bit of a weird phrase that…) aren’t strangers to moving with marketing trends and recently launched a #BestofBelfast campaign that thankfully let content marketing do the talking and selling.

What is Content Marketing?

Before we look at the Deliveroo ad let's just confirm what content marketing actually is.

According to Google, content marketing is “a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services” so that’s that then.

For me, I see content marketing as one of the more interesting sides to marketing in general.

Instead of a simple “here we are, this is what we do and this is how much it costs” message you focus on providing value as a hook to draw the customer in.

This value could be to inform, educate, humour, provide a cause for thought or countless other variations and it is paired with creative text, images or video to cut through the noise of everything else out there in the ether.

Deliveroo and John Long’s Fish & Chips

In the case of Deliveroo, they caught my eye by telling me a short story (in a video under 1 minute) about John Long’s Fish & Chips, a staple of the Belfast food scene for decades that I’d never even heard of!

Now I’m interested.

Not once did the video say “buy now” or talk about an “evening special”. Instead, the video told me that John Long keeps things traditional, that he hasn’t changed his batter recipe in over 100 years and that his patrons love it. That’s what hooked me in.

Obviously it helped that the video looked and sounded great as well and you can easily see a difference between the John Long's content ad above and the more regular "order from us" ad seen below.

Lessons to Learn

So, with all that in mind what can we learn and how can we apply it to our own businesses?

The formula is simple…

Decide what type of value you want to bring to the table. Think about what is going to truly interest your target customer and then combine that with eye-catching creative that makes them stop and listen to you and you alone.

See? Simple.

It’s the application and creation that’s the hard part.

For more on content marketing contact me here.

What Next After Facebook Stories?

In a move that surprised absolutely nobody, Facebook has finally completely rolled out their new Facebook Stories feature…at least here in the UK and Ireland.

At present the Facebook Stories feature, which is almost identical to Instagram Stories, which in turn is a carbon-copy rip-off of Snapchat Stories, is only available to personal account holders.

This means that, for now, the Stories feature is inaccessible and unavailable to Facebook business and brand pages. That could of course change in the coming months.

This entire episode, Facebook’s aggressive replication of the feature invented by Snapchat, leads me to consider one key question – why?

No-one can truly say or know why, unless they’re coming from Facebook HQ, but I think that it points us towards two trends that will continue to grow and develop…

Micro Content

Social media is filled with micro content in varying forms nowadays. A quick scroll through your Facebook newsfeed will most likely reveal countless 10, 20 and 30 second videos.

The same can be said of Instagram and Twitter, the birthplace of micro content as we know it today, where one piece of text, image or video is all people want.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule and certain channels and mediums (such as podcasting, long-form journalism and YouTube shows) thrive with longer forms of content but as a whole the trends seem to suggest that we love bite-sized chunks.

Snapchat discovered this and Facebook, via Instagram, has simply replicated the process indicating that they think this form of messaging and entertainment is here to stay or get bigger!

Storytelling

This leads us to my next point, storytelling.

Storytelling in marketing isn’t a new concept (far from it!) but in years gone by, even in the digital age, it was done at a much slower rate over the course of weeks and months.

That all changed with the introduction of tools like Twitter where people and businesses could provide quick updates and messages literally all day and night if they wished.

Snapchat Stories, and the new Instagram and Facebook replications, took this one massive step further by giving brands and businesses the ability to story tell quickly, easily and most importantly, visually.

Now consumers and fans can dip in and out of the “stories” of their favourite personalities, brands and businesses at will, whenever they want to. All of this is again made easier for consumers to do because everything is now micro (point one!) so they don’t feel like they have to commit so much time and attention to the content if they don’t want to.

This new level of access has also lead to countless new creative storytelling avenues whilst also opening up more casual and comfortable ways to communicate and engage and the entire episode hints at storytelling becoming even more powerful and important as we move even further into social and digital marketing!

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If any of this has got the dusty old cogs in your brain turning about your own business or project you can get in touch with me here!