To Craft Content Marketing That Makes You Money, Do This
To Craft Content Marketing That Makes You Money, Do This
Image source: Bon Appétit
A food magazine and hot sauce company are slaying the content marketing game right now.
Hot Ones and Bon Appétit are checking off all the boxes of what really good content marketing looks like in 2019.
Big brands that have been around for a long time are currently facing the challenge of humanizing their brand and making it relatable to their customers. That’s why longtime legacy skincare brands are tumbling to indie brands like Glossier and Kylie Cosmetics who have community building and connection on lockdown.
Through their YouTube channels, Hot Ones and Bon Appétit have figured out how to humanize the big brands behind them by making absolutely addicting content that has built an audience of 7 million and 4 million YouTube subscribers respectively.
When you watch an episode from either of these channels you can immediately grasp why they have cult followings and why their audiences continue to grow every day.
Hot Ones and Bon Appétit’s approaches perfectly capture how startup brands should be executing their content marketing strategies in today’s day and age regardless of audience or product.
Here are the top keys that are making Hot Ones and Bon Appétit’s content marketing an insane success, and how you can apply it to your business.
Figure Out People’s Best Memories With Your Product
Image source: Sean Evans
Hot Ones figured out that no one cares about hot sauces.
What people remember when they think about hot sauce is that time when their friend bit into a ghost pepper and they couldn’t stop crying, making everyone around them laugh hysterically.
The best memories people have around hot sauces isn’t the actual product, it’s the memory of people’s reactions to someone who ate something ridiculously hot.
Hot Ones figured this out and decided to capture this in every single Youtube episode.
They interview celebrities while they’re eating a line of progressively hotter wings and capture content gold while the celebrity starts losing their mind and answers in a rage while being interviewed by the host.
By capturing the emotion of what makes hot sauces so special and replaying that emotion in every single episode, Hot Ones was naturally able to translate that into consumer desire and cash flow to the tune of $7 million.
Hot Ones sells all of its infamous hot sauces so that you can reenact the same torture at home with your friends and create new memories manufactured by their product.
This is marketing gold, people — when you’re able to inject your product into the memories of your customers.
If you want to figure this out for your brand, start by locating your customers’ best memories with your product.
“Money Is A Guaranteed Side Effect Of Having Attention” — Nas Yassin
This quote by Nas Yassin should be the wallpaper of every entrepreneur’s laptop right now.
If you want to put your business on the fast track to making money, you should focus on making your brand addictive.
Bon Appétit does an amazing job at this — they gave numerous members on their team their own YouTube shows and let their personalities shine.
Image source: Bon Appétit
Brad is obsessed with fermenting things, Claire is insanely good at recreating mass-produced junk food from scratch, and Chris reverse engineers recipes after only tasting and smelling the dishes while blindfolded.
Every host has a distinct personality and unique approach that puts each of them in a category of one.
There’s no one else like them doing the weird things that they’re doing, so the addiction you develop is strong. These hosts have commanded so much fanfare and attention that at this point that they can create content about anything and people will still watch.
This strong YouTube content marketing play has made Bon Appétit, an old school brand from the ’50s relatable and relevant to Millennials and Gen Z-ers.
Even though I have no plans to ferment anything or reverse engineer a dish in the near future, Bon Appétit’s website is now my first go-to when I’m trying to figure out what to cook for dinner.
Continued attention eventually leads to engagement, loyalty and money, every time.
To duplicate this for your business, focus on creating content that’ll capture your audience’s attention rather than content that’ll make you money.
Money will come naturally if you do an amazing job of making your content addictive.
Humanize And Create Relatability
These content marketing strategies have humanized and created relatability for these largely faceless brands (Hot Ones is owned by Complex).
Do I think any less of the Bon Appétit brand because Brad went noodling for catfishes in a swamp, or because Claire spent a whole episode creating Warheads candy from scratch?
Nope — if anything, those episodes made the brand way more relatable and removed the image of them being that fancy food magazine I always see at Whole Foods but would never buy.
Through this simple content marketing play that humanizes the brand, Bon Appétit is creating a new generation of customers they didn’t have access to before.
When you humanize a brand, you hit a new layer of brand loyalty and bond with your audience that leads to recurring customers and raving fans.
To mimic this for your business, add a human touch to your content marketing.
Whether that’s by sharing videos of you talking about your brand’s philosophy or product on your Instagram account or creating a YouTube miniseries with a host representing the brand, find opportunities to boost your content with a human liaison.
I send Friday emails that’ll turn your startup chase into a victory lap. Sign up here if that’s where you’re heading.