How To Make Your Content Good Enough To Eat With Ocado

Content is such an important part of marketing. 

It comes in all sorts of forms, from a lovely old blog to a snazzy video, but we’re always hoping for something similar: to connect with our audience and get them to take action.

Having worked as a journalist before joining online food giant Ocado, Laura Rowe knows a thing or two about good content. 

With Ocado producing the second biggest food mag in the UK, plus a whole host of delicious content for other channels, Laura is in charge of making sure everything the team creates makes their audience drool.

We spoke to Laura about what makes great content and luckily for us, she shared some of her top tips to help make your content work harder.

No Purpose = No Content

Make sure you’re 100% on the purpose of every piece of content you create. 

What are you trying to do with this content? Do you want to make your brand stand out, acquire a new customer, or get people to buy something? If you can’t think of a reason to create the content, don’t go ahead with it.

At the same time as (hopefully) achieving your goal, make sure your content is giving some sort of value to your audience. If it’s not, we’re sorry to say they’re likely to scroll on past.

Laura breaks value down into three areas:

🧠Educate the audience

⚡️Inspire the audience

🎉Entertain the audience

Combining your goal with something that adds value to your audience is the best way to create standout content they’ll want to read and act on.

Tie It Into Pillars 

Every piece of content you create should feel relevant to your brand. This is where your overall marketing strategy comes in.

Pull together a handful of topics that hit the sweet spot between things your audience cares about and things your brand can comfortably talk about (or take this from your strat, if you can). For Ocado, these are things like “food” and “family”.

Make sure your content falls into one of these pillars. Then, add your personality. Make it feel true to your brand. Humanise it. This is especially important for digital-first brands — content is one of your best opportunities to connect with your audience at a human level.

Track Your Data

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: data is key. It tells you if you’re achieving your goals and helps you prove it to the rest of the business.

Tracking digital stuff is pretty easy but getting data for something like a print magazine can be more difficult. The Ocado team have proven the success of their magazine using a nifty little trick: a control group.

About 10% of Ocado customers are never sent the Ocado magazine. Looking at their behaviour vs. customers who do read the mag has shown Laura the power of the team’s content. Insights like magazine readers buy more and more often, are worth their weight in gold.

Try using a control group to see the effects of your marketing. Keep a customer segment back and don’t show them any marketing and/or do so for particular campaigns. Then, compare their behaviour to your other segments and spot the differences.

Sweat Your Assets

Don’t create a piece of content, share it once, and leave it at that. Make the most of your investment by iterating on it.

Start with an idea. It could be responding to a specific cultural moment or trending topic. Think of content that could work for it, but try and think of evergreen ideas.

Create your first piece of content and build from there. See what’s working and improve on it.

For the Ocado team, this could mean creating a couple of recipes that hero a seasonal ingredient. From there, they might see one recipe is doing well, so they may shoot some photography or a video related to it.

They would then end up with a big bank of assets that could be rolled out in the future. The following year, they might be able to reuse the recipe or some of the other content for another campaign.

Ditch single-use content. Go after evergreen ideas that you can use again and adapt in the future.

Want to hear even more juicy tips from Laura? Watch her full talk now.