Content Marketing and Beverly Hills: What You Need to Know

Many of us love sitting down at the end of a long day and watching television. Some of us even plan an entire weekend around binging an entire season of our favorite shows.

A study by the NY Daily News found that the average American watches 5 hours of live TV a day! When it comes to cord cutters, Tech Crunch found that they are watching, “2.9 hours of Hulu per day, which is ahead of Netflix (2.2 hours), YouTube (2.1 hours), and Amazon Video (2 hours).”

Whether you have a traditional cable subscription, use a streaming service, or even both, Americans love to watch a good show.

With all the time spent on a screen, there are content marketing lessons to be found in them.

One of my most recent TV binges was The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and once I started I could not stop. From high-fashion to high-drama there is a lot to learn from the women of 90210. Keep reading for the content marketing lessons I took from this Bravo hit.

7 Content Marketing Lessons from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Look Your Best

Appearances are important to the women in Beverly Hills, just like presentation should be important to your business. When creating videos and images for your content marketing, it is imperative that they are professional and share your brand’s message.

In Emily’s blog post about creating branded visuals, she outlines 5 best practices for videos and images. They are:

1. Think about your main message. What are you trying to convey with the image or video?
2. Consider your brand’s font(s) and colors. How can you incorporate them in a visually appealing way?
3. Brand your marketing visuals with your company’s logo and/or website address when appropriate.
4. Keep it simple. You don’t want your visuals to be too convoluted or busy – it’s visually distracting.
5. Think about the target you’re trying to reach. What about the image or video will appeal to them? Does it share helpful information? Is it visually inspiring?

You can also find her recommendations for cost effective graphic design tools here.

Stand Out on Instagram

There are a lot of big personalities on the show, but one of America’s favorite cast mates is Giggy, Lisa Vanderpump’s dog. Giggy Vanderpump has 16.6 thousand followers on Instagram and has become a star in his own right.

Are you unsure if Instagram is right for your business? Here are three reasons your business needs to use it as part of your content marketing.

1. Put A Face to the Brand

A great profile includes an image that reflects your brand and a full bio. Post pictures of products, events, employees and more for customers to get to know your brand.

2. Provide Value and Appreciation to Followers

When you post content on Instagram, make sure the content is useful, informative, and high quality.

3. Drive Traffic to Your Page

Make it easy for Instagram users to find your page through custom hashtags and location tags. You can also monitor the effectiveness of hashtags as well.

For more reasons your business needs to be on Instagram, click here.

Keep Consistent Branding

One of the biggest breakaway stars of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is Erika Jayne. She makes no apologies for being her authentic self and neither should your business.

Creating a brand that is consistent is important to attract and maintain a loyal following. Whether you are forming a brand from scratch right now or need to review the one you already established, follow these tips to create a consistent brand on and offline.

 

1. A Design Language for All Media

One of the first things you need to do when trying to create consistent branding is to formulate a detailed design language for all media. This means detailing how your logo should appear against different backgrounds, which colors to use and how the brand should be presented.

This may not seem like an important detail, but it’s important to have consistent email signatures for everyone in your business. Here’s the vital information to include in company email signatures:

• Company Name and Website
• Your Title
• Your Phone Number
• Mailing Address
• Fax Number (if you have one)
• Social Networks with which you’d like people to connect with you (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

2. Thorough Brand Integration

Your brand should appear as more than just a logo and tagline. It needs to be integrated with other parts of your marketing efforts. Everything from your letterhead, social media profile pictures and more need to be consistent.

Another thing to consider is the voice of your business. Do you want your brand to be friendly? Are you trying to present your company as a formal and professional one? Depending on which goal you’re trying to achieve, you can develop a voice for your brand that you use in all your content marketing.

Articles for a friendly brand can be written from a very personal perspective. Instead of presenting the brand first, these articles can take the point of view of those behind the brand. If you’re an avid reader of our blog, there are a lot of different personalities that shine through our articles based on the author. The same goes for the tweets you send or Facebook posts you publish. Let your brand’s personality shine through!

3. An Integrated Effort

Maintaining a consistent brand image online and offline is all about consistency and integrated effort. With clear brand guidelines, a design language to follow and a voice to help direct communications with other parties, maintaining a strong and positive brand image should not be a problem.

Speak Directly to Your Audience

One feature of a lot of reality shows use is a confessional. This is when someone sits down alone in front of the camera and shares their thoughts about what is going on.

Through vlogging (video blogs) you can directly speak to your audience and connect with them virtually, face-to-face.

Here are three reasons why your business needs a vlog as part of your content marketing:

1. Most consumers prefer videos over text, so it provides another way to share your expertise and advice with customers.
2. People crave human interaction. A vlog is a fantastic way to show the human side of your business. After all, what’s more human than someone talking to you?
3. Vlogging can increase website traffic! By writing your description strategically and tagging the video with keywords in mind, you make your company’s site even more visible and increase SEO.

Click here for even more information on vlogging and tips to get you started.

Make Fans Customers

I must admit, I have purchased a couple of Erika Jayne’s songs. And if I could find it, I would probably buy Lisa Vanderpump’s wine.

It can take a lot to turn fans into actual customers. If you have people liking your page, but not seeing sales from fans, here are a few tips to get them to open their wallets.

1. Show Your Product in ActionFans may like your social media profiles because of the content you share, but that doesn’t mean they know all about the products or services you offer. While you want to follow the 80/20 rule for posting content, make sure you use some of your self-promotional space to showcase a product in action so followers can see what options are available.
2. Target Your MessageIf you’re using advertisements or promoted posts on sites like Facebook, take advantage of the ability to target your messages. Use zip codes or specific areas to reach only the users who are in your zone and can make a purchase. If you send your message blindly into a large group of people, you may have trouble securing a sale and ultimately end up wasting your advertising dollars.
3. Create IncentivesTo be successful with social media marketing, try to find ways to include your fans in your posts. By asking questions or holding polls you can get them excited, but to turn them into customers you should go a bit further. Create some sales or coupons just for fans on social media and encourage customers to like your page before making a purchase.

Reflect

Though I enjoy going through a season with the women of Beverly Hills, I love the reunion shows when everyone sits down together to discuss what happened. Hopefully when you reflect on your content marketing campaign, it will be smooth and informative (Bunnygate anyone?).

Before you can reflect on your content marketing campaign, you need to start the process by setting clear goals.

Here are some tips to help:

1. Plan in Advance
   

Instead of coming up with goals as you go, sit down and create an outline of what you want to achieve. If planning for a full year seems daunting, try working with a three or six-month timeline.

2. Set Goals

What do you ultimately want to achieve at the end of your content marketing plan? Do you want to improve your social media standing or drive more traffic to your website? Look at your current stats and set a realistic number to reach.

3. Create a Workplan

Just because you set clear goals that doesn’t mean the work is done. If your goal includes social media, post consistently and pay attention to what content is receiving the most interaction.

If your goals include increasing traffic to your website, pay attention to blogging. Regularly publishing a properly written blog post that includes keywords and tags is important for SEO.

Analyzing Your Content Marketing Campaign

After your campaign is over, it is time to determine if it was successful or not. Keep notes and records so you can review progress and change up plans if needed for your next content marketing campaign. Do more things that worked and get rid of activities that aren’t producing the results you’d like to see.

Also, don’t be deterred if you’re not a viral sensation overnight. When it comes to social media, it is important to have a modest, but engaged following, rather than having millions of followers who are not engaged and could even be bots. You can read more about quality of fans over quantity of fans here.

Content Marketing Lessons from TV

Whether or not the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is your cup of tea or not, you can certainly apply the content marketing lessons I noticed from them to your business.

Are you interested in learning more lessons from TV shows? Take a look at what the Three Girls team likes to watch:

Keeping Up with Social Media: How to be Number One Like a Kardashian/Jenner

5 Helpful Marketing Tips from the Gilmore Girls Revival

8 Public Relations Lessons from Friends

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