Over the last nine years, since we had our first child, I’ve become accustomed to no longer having full control over…well…anything.
And one particularly obvious example is in the music we listen to, both at home and in the car.
Where once we were free to play Bon Iver, Rae Morris or Radiohead, we’re now bombarded with requests, whether it’s the Encanto soundtrack, music from the Greatest Showman or Matilda: The Musical, yet again.
But since September, there’s only one show in town: the songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters, which is such an utterly preposterous premise that I genuinely was sceptical it existed when the kids first requested it – sharp, polished pop + demon hunters; make it make sense!
And it’s not just our household – it got a rapturous reception from the guests at Jim’s birthday party a couple of weeks back, and the boys are even singing it in choir at school.
It really has become a phenomenon – the lead single Golden was the global number one this summer, and the album went Platinum, with over a billion streams, topping the Billboard Global 200 for ten weeks in a row.
The songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters haven’t gone viral in the traditional way – performances on chat shows, securing airplay on the radio and so on.
Instead, they’ve taken the world by storm via a feature-length animated Netflix film – they don’t have to “advertise” the music in a traditional sense, because the film does it for them.
And when you break it down, it’s content marketing at an incredibly high level, because the content isn’t just the thing that leads to the sale, it’s the product too.
Which means that it never, ever feels like advertising.
Get down to brass tacks though, and it absolutely is – the Netflix film has driven streams in its MILLIONS – in the height of summer, Golden had over 3 million streams in a single day, all made possible by content that gets and keeps attention.
There’s a hugely instructive point for anyone running a business and looking to attract prospects and customers via content marketing – the less it feels like advertising and the more value it adds in and of itself, the more effective it will be.
A huge amount of time, money and effort was poured into making the K-Pop movie as good as it could possibly be, with the understanding that the better the movie, the more streams it’d result in on the backend.
It’s tempting to dismiss K-Pop Demon Hunters as a one-off, but the truth is that it’s not a new approach, but a super modern incarnation of something that’s been happening for years.
The John Lewis Christmas ads and the Apple product launches are good examples of the kind of marketing that’s so compelling that people want to consume it, even if they initially have no explicit interest in the product.
You might not have the budget of John Lewis, Apple or Netflix, but there’s definitely a principle that any small business can take and use to make their marketing more effective: aim to make your content valuable in and of itself, rather than acting merely as a bridge to a sales situation.
Whether you entertain, inspire, educate or inform, if your content can consistently get and hold the attention of your target market, not only will you organically make more sales, but you’ll also build an audience of people tuned into what you do, so when you come to “sell” with a more “traditional” marketing or sales campaign, you’re assured the attention you need to make it a success.
