Kim Kardashian taught me everything I know about content marketing. She did not teach me anything about content marketing, but she introduced me to this relatively new marketing method.
I have learned a lot of excellent content marketing strategies and tactics from some brilliant marketers, including Ryan Deiss and Jimmy Daly. My friend Kim is a brilliant marketer and doesn’t get the credit she deserves.
Kim and I agree that content marketing is a must for every business. I’ll explain.
Nickelodeon’s Journey into Content Marketing
We have to start by returning to Kim and Paris Hilton’s days strolling Beverly Hills’s streets in their ritzy sweatshirts. At the same time, I was a mother living a glamorous life in a knockoff Patagonia sweatshirt, carrying my baby around Central Park on a Baby Bjorn covered in spit-up. Below is a picture that proves my chicness.
Paris and Kim’s baby is now a 6ft1 cornerback in high school who drinks a gallon a day of milk and uses phrases like “that’s fresh” and “totally fired.” In 2005, when I took this photo, I was offered a position writing a Nickelodeon blog. After asking Yahoo (we didn’t have Google back then), “What is a blog?” and then figuring out what a “web log” is, I accepted the job offer.
My blog posts were published on Nick’s parenting website, Parents Connect, about spit-up, night feedings, and dirty diapers (See: Glamourous).
Remember the look of most websites in 2005. There are no Buzzfeed-style article feeds, white layouts, gifs, memes, or videos. Websites were more like Las Vegas on steroids. You. Fully lit, amplified, and ready to sell. You. All. The. Things.
To visualize it, I took a screenshot using the Wayback Machine of the Nick website I was working for at the time. Imagine that the image files are gone, but you see big, bright, flashy ads instead of question marks.
We sold a lot of ads even though it was a Nickelodeon product, and its content was exciting (See Diapers). Our website was flooded with pictures of the newest and best parenting gear.
The ads did not work.
It turns out that people do not like being sold to in an obnoxious, flashy way. They prefer to be told to “buy it now.” It is inadequate to shove a product into someone’s face while trying to catch up with the latest diapering technique or discover what happened in Survivor.
Ragu Spaghetti Wasn’t Happy
After a few more Las Vegas-like months, the Ragu Spaghetti Sauce team came to our sales team and told us they were unsure about their ROI. The ads were not generating many sales or clicks. They spent a lot of money and didn’t get much in return.
They had an idea. On another website, bloggers shared their favorite recipes with ads and coupons. They wondered if they could do something similar, where Nickelodeon Bloggers wrote articles about how they use Ragu products organically and naturally.
Content marketing, for me at least, was born on that day.
Kim Kardashian is an unlikely pioneer of content marketing
Kim Kardashian, who lives on the United States Pacific Coast, also made her content marketing discoveries. Kim began to see that she could sell products by sharing her favorite products and her personal life on her blog and Twitter.
Kim raved that the Sketchers Shape Ups made her rear end even more sexy. Guess what? Sketchers sold tons of shoes. So many that Complex claimed Kim’s support of Sketchers was the most critical sneaker moment in history (which is shocking considering that Michael Jordan supported Jordans).
Back to Nickelodeon.
In New City, I worked on my endorsements. I won’t boast, but I made tiny fairy lights, spaghetti, and lasagna using Ragu sauce and glowsticks.
While Complex hasn’t yet declared that my endorsement of pasta sauce was the “defining moment” of all spaghetti, I can say that Ragu received several coupon clicks on the recipe page of my souped-up spaghetti sauce recipe with tiny pieces of broccoli.
Content marketing worked. People wanted the recipes and the crafts and the how-to-hide-veggies-in-sauce ideas. They were more likely to click a coupon or promotional link when they received these ideas than if they had just been bombarded with photos of spaghetti sauce jars.
Content marketing is what I started doing. I began writing about diaper bags after I finished my spaghetti article. After diaper bags, I wrote about baby food spoons and butt paste. As my children grew older, I wrote about books, music, crayons, and slime. I can’t tell you how often I have made slime and written about it.
Kim and Me. Me and Kim. Together, we were reinventing marketing. Ads are out. Blogs are in. Heavy sales are out. Marketing finesse is in. After a few years, the Nickelodeon website looked utterly different. Bye-bye, flashy Vegas ads. Hello… content.