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Strategy

Content Marketing

We love to help you discover the power of content marketing to attract, engage and retain your digital audience.

Tell us your content marketing needs
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What is content marketing?

Content is everywhere. Content marketing is interwoven into your entire digital ecosystem. You need content for your product pages, social channels, blogs, FAQs, newsletters… you name it.

The core of content marketing is to answer the questions, needs, frustrations, and pain points customers face and eventually form a positive relationship with them through your channels.

Illustration of gated content, laptop with padlock on the screen

Why content marketing?

Great content is your ticket to capturing your audience’s attention and generating traffic, views, and eventually leads. The best way to achieve this is through a combination of free and gated content.

Free content generates views and traffic. Gated content, or in other words “putting your content behind a gate”, brings in the leads. Because the gate can only be opened in exchange for data, which can later be used to start the sales conversation.

On top of that, it's safe to say that online content marketing not only benefits the marketing department, but also Sales & Customer Service. As they always have to answer recurring questions, it helps if those questions are answered through a self-service mechanism. This ensures a faster sales process and a lower workload for CS. Win-win, right?

Advertising is asking someone on a date. Your content is the reason they say yes

Dries De Kimpe, Content Strategist

How we define a content plan

Getting ourselves in customer's minds

When we define a digital content strategy, we always start by putting ourselves in the customer's mind and try to identify as many problems, struggles, questions, … as possible. Of course, there are different ways to get this information.

One way to do this is through workshops where we use the know-how from your team to get acquainted with your clients. This input combined with data-driven insights like keyword research or an analysis of the existing content gives us a pretty good image of the people on the other side of the screen. The information we gather here can result in buyer personas, user journeys, content backlogs, etc. From there on we craft a roadmap for the next months to decide which content needs to be created or updated.

Mapping out the technical content track

In the case of a brand-new website, we also take the technical content track into account, meaning that we map out the content model, the taxonomy, the information architecture, etc. This is to ensure the content is structured the right way for both front- and back end. Since the requirements are different for each company, we do not pin ourselves to one particular CMS. You can check out all the CMSs we work with on our partner page.

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What we expect from you

It is important to note here that content marketing is a strategy that takes more time compared to hard selling techniques like advertising and campaigning. In order to generate ROI, content marketing is something that your whole organization needs to embody. That is also why content has to be a co-creation process. The business expertise & know-how is on your side and the content expertise & know-how is on our side. Turns out we need both to do it right.

Furthermore, the complete embodiment also means that your whole organisation needs to have the right expectations and know what they are getting into. The best way to explain this is by comparing content marketing with how Simon Sinek sees leadership. He compares it with going to the gym. When you go to the gym and expect to see results in the mirror the next day, you will be disappointed and quit because you will see nothing. But if you keep going consistently, eventually you will get into shape. It is the same with content marketing. It is not about the big content pieces, it is about the consistency of creating valuable content and sticking to the plan until you get into shape.

Take a look at a few of our best content cases

Port of Antwerp

Port of Antwerp-Bruges underscores merger with a new website

With The Reference, Port of Antwerp-Bruges has built a composable website where everybody can find the information they are looking for quickly and accurately.

Vandersanden building facade

Vandersanden

Vandersanden is a Belgian producer of bricks, facing bricks and clickers, both for private homes and the streetscape. They wanted to reposition themselves as a partner in building solutions by focusing more on their services rather than their products.

Mennens employees together with the team from The Reference on the balcony at the Ghent office

Mennens

Mennens, a company that specializes in steel wire rope, lifting and hoisting equipment, and fall protection, partnered with us to further develop their brand and online presence. 

Let's continue the conversation

Did you like what you read? Are you eager to find out how our creative content marketing services can help you further? Feel free to reach out, we would love to have a chat.

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