Page 23 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

believed in Stephen. He possessed an excellent business mind, an urgency to
learn, and a great sense of storytelling. I had to say yes!

Our first step was to determine where he could maneuver in a highly
saturated, low-growth market. We couldn’t afford to be a “me too.” We
conducted a complete market and competitive analysis and discovered that
among the hundreds of wineries in his region, none of them had a meaningful
digital marketing presence. At the same time, his potential retail customers were
trying to gain a foothold in the social media space. In this intersection, we found
our opportunity.

We had to scale a content marketing effort quickly and decided that
Stephen’s primary source would be video. He was a natural on camera, and the
lush and ancient countryside of Provence provided an ideal backdrop to explore
wine making, food, history, art, and the local color.

Stephen consistently documented his winemaking journey in a very human
and entertaining way. He talked about a labeling crisis that almost crushed his
business. He created entertaining videos about the ridiculous paperwork he faced
from the French government, what it was like to attend an international wine-
tasting competition, and how the grapes were harvested in the early morning
sunlight. He created stories about his village, his pets, and his family. He shared
his anguish as he knelt beside grape vines decimated by a 13-minute hail storm.
He captured the pure joy of his children dancing while on a family vacation.

He was putting a human and modern face to a stodgy, traditional business.
In addition to producing content, we also had a network strategy and
continuously worked on building a wine-loving audience that was passionate
about his product and the stories from his little family business. As his audience
and engagement multiplied, Stephen was able to share this data with huge wine
retailers to prove a point of differentiation. No winemaker in the region had the
presence and audience that the upstart Mirabeau had. The strategy worked, and
the orders started coming in.
Stephen followed our strategy to dominate this unsaturated content niche and
his progress was steady. But on his 222nd video, Stephen found the gold at the
end of the rainbow. In just 29 seconds, he demonstrated how to open a wine
bottle with only his shoe.6 That video has now attracted well over 9 million
views … one of the greatest small business video success stories in the history of
the web!
The viral attention gave a significant lift to all the content on the site.
Because Stephen had worked so long and hard to provide entertaining videos,
the viral visitors stuck around to see what else he had for them. Since the “shoe
video,” the winery’s “About Mirabeau” video on its YouTube channel has