Marketing design
7
min read
Do you remember the episode from Friends where Monica was hired to create new recipes using Mockolate, a new product created as a replacement for chocolate? The creators of Mockolate were probably inspired by the producers of Jell-O in the early 1900s.
Jell-O, a jelly dessert brand, was founded in 1897. Over time, it has earned some popularity, but the business wasn’t striving. The owner was about to sell it for $35, when a fresh idea appeared. Jell-O published a free cookbook with recipes containing their jelly. Cookbooks became a household staple along with the desserts themselves, producing huge income for the company. After more than 100 years, Jell-O is still on the market.
The story of Mockolate didn’t end as well. Even a talented chef like Monica couldn’t make anything tasty out of Mockolate, so we don’t know if they found a more dedicated content creator and managed to succeed.
Let’s take a look at the real examples instead, stories that tell the history of content marketing from old ages to our time.
If you search for the first content marketing cases, you’ll go deep into the 19th or even 18th century. For example, the Content Marketing Institute claims that the Poor Richard’s Almanack, a yearly edition by Benjamin Franklin published in 1732, was aimed at promoting Franklin’s printing business.
Another example mentioned is an early 19th-century newspaper by French Librairie Galignani and mid-19th-century American Bee Journal published by Samuel Wagner. However, there are doubts whether these editions were truly just marketing tools or a side project of individuals who wanted to try publishing as a side project.
Trying to date early examples of content marketing, we can go as far as the Italian Renaissance, when Cosimo Medici needed to promote the Florence Republic and its art. So, he commissioned painter Giorgio Vasari to write a book about the greatest artists of Florence. That is how The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects was written in 1550.
Surely, we could find examples as ancient as the existence of literacy. The main point is that content marketing wasn’t invented in the digital era.
A well-known example of an early case of content marketing that survived until today is the Michelin guide. I’m not a car person, and I knew Michelin guide long before I discovered it was made by the tires company.
At first, it wasn’t clear what the connection between fine dining and auto tires was. When I learned that the idea was to provide a guide to people who traveled by car, I thought it was genius. In the early ages of the Michelin business, there were less than 3,000 cars in the whole of France. Car traveling was not as popular as it is now, so the guide was aimed at promoting it.
For the first decades, it was just about maps and travel tips, and only in 1929 the restaurants were included. Since 1900, it has been one of the most successful content marketing examples. It has played a role in the development of star chef culinary, and even in the run of the Second World War. When the Allies landed in France, they found the road signs destroyed, so an extra edition of Michelin guides was published for them to orientate.
From the first recognized marketing magazine to the moment when the term “content marketing” was invented, 100 years passed. It was coined by journalist John F. Oppedahl in 1996, and since then, the phenomenon has been constantly growing.
The same year, Bill Gates wrote a famous essay, "Content is king, " and we don’t dare to argue with him in 2024. As a design agency, we work with visuals, but we know that visuals are secondary to quality content. However, content marketing has evolved as the web has developed extensively since its birth.
At the dawn of the internet, all pages were flowing on the web, and you could only find a page if you had a link or if you knew the URL address. When the amount of information on the web increased to a certain point, the search engine appeared. Since then, page ranking in search results has become crucial for marketers.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, appeared in 1997. First, keywords were randomly placed on a page in large numbers to convince search engines that the page was very relatable. So, Google decided to fight against such pages, and since then, algorithms and search engines have been in constant fight.
The websites work hard to have a good reputation for search engines, while search engines try to provide relevant results to the users. The status of each of them is ranked by Domain Authority score, which defines the likeliness of each source to appear at the top of the results.
Reliable websites, like BBC, would have a high DA ranking. However, the spread of social media allowed everyone to publish their content on websites with high domain authority, like Facebook. And the new era began.
As soon as social media star rose on the horizon, companies were there to use these platforms for their content marketing. Brands wanted to seem as human as possible to connect to their audiences.
Nowadays, social media are full of ads and can work as a self-sufficient online shop. However, brands still work hard to make their pages engaging and fun. Whenever a new social media starts trending — Snapchat, TikTok, you name it – all the brands struggle to fit into the format and provide quality content.
Social media has created the phenomenon of influencers and made it possible for brands to go viral faster than ever. And social media content creation has become even easier nowadays, when…
Over time, there have been many concerns about how AI would affect all facets of our lives, but for content marketing, there is no doubt it is a huge game changer.
At the beginning of the ChatGPT hype, there was an expectation that search engines would penalize websites that publish AI-generated texts. Instead, they seem to have embraced this innovation instead of fighting against it.
Even websites like Quora, where people go to get information from real people, are suggesting answers from ChatGPT first. After that, there are plenty of answers by real accounts written with trademark AI style.
Unlike with AI image generation, texts have not raised many legal issues. We quickly learned that the information from AI is not very reliable, but so is most of the information on the internet. Medium tried to create a solution by obliging authors to label AI-generated articles.
So, what has changed for content marketers with AI? Creating elaborate illustrations has become much easier. For texts, ChatGPT's tone of voice has become easily recognizable, and one has to try harder to make it sound natural. However, it helps to create more content out of one piece, easily adapting texts to different social media formats.
With AI, the amount of easily generated content has grown, but the amount of original quality fact-checked content hasn’t increased so much. To stand out in the world of AI, content marketing must be more creative, personal, and unexpected.
Let’s go back to the story of Michelin and their guide. As it often happens with an extra successful content marketing product, the restaurant guide became arguably more famous than the tires. Michelin stars became symbols of the huge fine dining industry, and even people who have never been to a $200 dinner know about it.
But apart from cultural influence, there is also an interesting business story behind it. Michelin guides are a huge driver for tourism, that’s why some national tourist offices are willing to pay a lot to have a guide of their country. That’s how Michelin got $1.8m from South Korea’s tourism board and $4.4m from Thailand. Sounds like a good side income, but as for a multibillion company, it’s not much.
Some tourist guides need just a good author, designer, and publisher, but it’s a lot more complicated with Michelin. To ensure fair coverage of the restaurants, they hire inspectors whose job is to taste restaurants and write reviews. They must make around 24,167 visits a year (all meals paid by Michelin).
The tourist guide is not profitable as a separate business. But for Michelin tires business, it still brings profits. Every time the guide enters a new country, the tires sales rise 3% there (translated into huge amounts of money given the tires market size). The business magic of Michelin works for the reviewed restaurants, too. According to famous chef Joël Robuchon, one Michelin star brings a restaurant 20% increase in business, 2 stars — 80%, and 3 stars — 100%.
The question most of us want to know the answer to is, is it worth investing in content marketing nowadays? Social media is rising, influencer marketing is big, and who knows what comes tomorrow? The short answer is that all marketing is content marketing. Ads need good content, and influencers can’t do much without content either.
There is no reliable data on how much revenue content marketing brings to companies. We brought up the case of Michelin, but it’s clear that this story is unique and not easily replicable.
What data tells us is that the down economy did not have a negative impact on content marketing. Research by Bynder showed that 53% of tech, IT, and telecom companies plan to increase their investment in content marketing. Obviously, they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t convert into business profit.
You probably already do some content marketing, even if you don’t think of it that way. Your social media, landing pages – they all need good content to be an effective source of leads. So, what stops you from diving deeper into the world of content marketing? If that’s quality design, we’ve got a solution for you. Drop us a line, and we’ll provide you with a qualified designer to cover all your needs for marketing visuals.
