Expert Talks About Producing Valuable Content Amidst COVID-19

ACCESSTRADE MY’s inaugural summit, the Performance Growth Summit 2020 was held on September 12 and it successfully brought together digital and affiliate marketing experts across Asia.
In this Expert Talks series, we are going to highlight the major issues brought forward by the experts in PGS 2020.
Andrew Prasatya, Head of Content Marketing (SEO) of iPrice Group talked in detail about “Content Marketing: Producing Valuable Content for Users during COVID-19 Period”.
In simple words, content marketing is the content produced by businesses to give valuable insights to users. Content marketing educates users and adds value to their lives.
If you are a business owner, digital marketer or affiliate marketer, some of the benefits of content marketing to your business are:
- Creates strong brand awareness
- Instills respect and admiration in the industry
- Leads to indirect customer conversions
- Enhances team coordination in your company
- Increases site traffic
- Improves SEO
- Leads to direct customer conversions
Some of the highly effective types of content are articles, infographics, mixed-media pieces, data visualisation, images, videos, interactive maps, press releases, and quizzes, just to name a few. However, Andrew stressed that it is important to find the type of content that works best for your business. It is crucial to focus on the format of content that reaches your target audience.
Who Should You Distribute Your Content To?
Instead of focusing on your own content platforms such as your Facebook, Instagram and website, you should also try to tap into external platforms such as news websites and blogs.
While you may be focusing on current customers who have brought your products and potential customers who are the right customer fit, there are two more groups that you should tap into.
The potential amplifiers who are the journalists and media, niche writers and bloggers, podcasters and video channel creators, social influencers, and event organisers. Besides that, you should also focus on the broader community. These are people who consume content in your field but aren’t your potential customers and people who don’t broadcast or amplify content but may be influential through private references.
Common Mistakes In Content Marketing
- Being narcissistic
If you are focused on highlighting your product and boast about how great your company is, you are guilty of being narcissistic. Instead, the focus of content marketing should be to add value to people’s lives. Giving information and insights to your target audience would be a better way to reach your audience.
- Trying too hard to reinvent the wheel
It is better to learn form someone who is producing great content instead of trying to build something from scratch. You can learn from businesses in Southeast Asia as well as across the globe.
- Topics are too wide or too niche
Content that is too wide may confuse people while content that is too niche may only interests a very small group of people. Try to focus on you target audience instead of trying to include everyone out there or only focusing on a specific group of people.
- Lack of success metrics
Any content marketing needs data that you can collect and measure to see the effectiveness of your work. Instead of finding metrics to simply show the data, you should find the objective of your content marketing and use it to set your success metrics. For instance, if you want to increase your leads, your success metrics should focus on the number of leads.
Strategies To Produce Valuable Content During COVID-19 Period

Source: Freepik
- Understand what your brand is about – Brand Identity Breakdown
Find your business model and all the many ways you connect with your audience. Make sure you know what your brand is about and try to break it down as detailed as possible. This will enable you to discover the topics that you can explore especially during COVID-19 period where it may not be suitable to talk about your products directly.
- Learn about the interests of your users
Find out the behaviour of your audience and let them know about it. They are bound to appreciate the insight which they were not aware of earlier. Some of the sources you can easily learn about user behaviour are Google Trends, Google Ads, Reddit, and surveys.
The insights could be a great tool for you to create interesting and relatable content.
- Get to know your customers’ needs and help them
During this pandemic period, there are many things that people cannot do due to safety and travel restrictions. You should focus on these things that people are not able to do and try to help them as much as you can.
For instance, since people can’t travel across borders, some travel sites came up with virtual tours of popular travel destinations around the world. Another example is fitness brands that came up with virtual workout videos for people who used to frequent the gym before the pandemic.
- Read the news trend and make 10x more content
When news media reports about an event or subject, they usually do not make in-depth content about the subject matter. For instance, the reporting of Nintendo’s Switch which is in demand during the pandemic.
If you are in a related field, you should think about creating a more detailed and in-depth content based on the news report about Nintendo Switch. For example, iPrice created contents to compare Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in the ASEAN region during the lockdown.
If the media shows interest to explore a subject, it is a good indication that they might be interested in the content that you create as well. Your article might be highlighted in their platform and this will be highly beneficial to you.
Key Takeaways From The Content Marketing Session By Andrew Prasatya:
- The COVID-19 situation provides bigger opportunities for companies to create good contents that are valuable and insightful.
- When it comes to creating content, learn from someone who is already creating great content.
- Distribute your content to existing customers as well as a broader audience.
- Try different approaches and learn about user interests.
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As the leading affiliate marketing platform in Southeast Asia, ACCESSTADE Malaysia is committed to bring the latest information and insights to affiliate marketers and digital marketers in the region. If you have missed PGS 2020, worry not! You can watch the full session here!
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