What Star Wars Teaches Us About Content Marketing and PR - Heying
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February 21, 2017

What Star Wars Teaches Us About Content Marketing and PR

While entertaining audiences all these years, the Star Wars enterprise has also been a great lesson in content marketing.

A close look at the Star Wars films reveals that most of the qualities that make them successful are the same elements that make up effective content marketing programs.

There are vital lessons for content marketers to learn by looking at how they marketed the latest release, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” and how they are starting to build buzz for the next installment in the series.

 

Keep Details Under Wraps: There is little information coming forth in terms of information or trailers to satiate the fans until the much awaited release. Everything is kept top secret. Significant effort has gone in to ensure there aren’t any leaks to the movie plot.

The small details that are revealed get the super fan excitement levels higher and make even more people want to watch the movie. The success of the Star Wars franchise has been such that the audience itself begins hypothesizing about future editions.

Know Your Audience and Engage Them: What Disney did first to market “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was to identify its different audiences. And once they did that, they went about targeting each of them brilliantly with high-value content. Thanks to these thoughtful efforts and effective PR planning, Disney spent less on conventional marketing and advertising.

Knowing and engaging your audience is a tried-and-tested strategy that produces results. In fact, this strategy works even in the most boring niches.

Use Marketing that Connects to Older Content: Drawing parallels to prior content, if done in an intelligent manner, can work to build interest.

There were several similarities with the original 1977 Star Wars film in the plot. Disney succeeded by blending the right amount of the past with the present and crafting an innovative progression of a recognizable universe.

Serialized Content Marketing Engages Audiences Over Time: It’s important to note each Star Wars movie answers questions raised in the previous movies and poses new questions too. This strategy helps engage the audiences because they want to know how these questions are answered in future Star Wars films. This makes the audience want to see the next edition, and you can’t have better content marketing than that.

Telling a continuous story is very effective as a content marketing strategy. The content you create must be consistent, and engaging enough to generate excitement and interest long-term.

Create Content that Creates an Emotional Connection: There is something about the Star Wars series and characters that connect emotionally to people. For most fans, the fascination began in childhood.

And fans don’t just hypothesize about the plot of future films, they also talk about it on social media. The social mentions keep increasing day-by-day and that’s great publicity.

Encourage your customers, audiences, or website visitors to share the content you’ve created religiously on social media. Long-term relationships matter more than one-off promotions.

Though your business may not have the reach of Star Wars, if the content is relevant, useful and connects with your audience, you’ll be able to attract, capture, convert and delight them, causing them to become promoters over time.

Diversify Your Content Marketing Channels: So how do you create engaging, useful, and relevant content? Focus on various kinds of content marketing, like Disney does.

You have text, audio, video, apps, and games as well as branded experiences to explore. Disney focuses on all these, which actually helps them to maximize the audiences they are able to reach out to.

Create as many diverse content channels as your infrastructure and investment permit. Focus on diversifying your channels in a strategic manner. This can help you cross-promote your products, and you can use one channel to promote the other.

Consistency and Innovation Are Key: Consistent and innovative branding is integral to strategic marketing. This, along with the skill to adapt to new audiences and technology can help you attract more targeted audience and build an enduring brand.

 

May the content marketing force be with you!